Solana NFT Sales and Transaction Volume

DeFi is not the only driver of Solana adoption. Digital artists have also embraced the platform’s low fees and created some smash hits in the process.

The two top NFT projects on Solana are “Degenerate Ape Academy,” which hit the ball out of the park in August 2021 and sold out in minutes, and rival “Solana Monkey Business,” whose secondary sales have continued growing in the last months.

Total NFT sales reached $247 million in September 2021 and $246 million in October. At the same time, Ethereum NFT sales amounted to $2.2 billion and $1.7 billion, respectively.

Most of that volume comes from big-ticket sales such as “CryptoPunks” or “Bored Ape Yacht Club,” where a single deal can be worth millions of dollars.

Secondary sales for Solana’s top NFT projects from August to October 2021

Source: Messari

Solana NFT Sales

Looking at just the dollar-denominated volume doesn’t paint a complete picture, however. Ethereum saw 132,879 and Solana 68,235 unique buyers in October, according to Messari. The average amount paid for an NFT on Solana was $1,097 in October 2021, signifying 224,000 purchases. 

From a liquidity standpoint, selling NFTs on Solana might be even more attractive to artists than Ethereum because competition is less intense, and the number of transactions is still half.

Solana is backed by the high and mighty in crypto, and the project showcases promising technological innovation. Centralization risk is a caveat, but large token holders are unlikely to dump significant amounts of SOL any time soon — not while there is money to be made in DeFi, futures and NFTs.

But Solana is not the only crypto project competing with Buterin’s “world computer” which itself is a force of nature and still the main driver of innovation and value in crypto. We will therefore also take a look at projects like Polkadot and Algorand.

This article is an extract from the 80+ page Scaling Report: Does the Future of Decentralized Finance Still Belong to Ethereum? co-published by the Crypto Research Report and Cointelegraph Consulting, written by ten authors and supported by Arcana, Brave, ANote Music, Radix, Fuse, Cryptix, Casper Labs, Coinfinity, Ambire, BitPanda and CakeDEFI.