Solana NFT Activity Doubles In May

Solana’s on-chain NFT activity is on the rise, producing some much-needed signs of recovery for the ailing network.

According to data from Messari, the daily NFT transaction count has doubled from the start of May to sit near 60,000 based on a seven-day moving average.

Meanwhile, NFT activity on Ethereum has fallen off a cliff, from more than 100,000 daily transactions in March to less than 20,000 today. Polygon is also processing around 20,000 NFT transactions each day after tagging 70,000 in February.

Mad Lads is the top-trending Solana NFT collection over the past 24 hours, with more than 35,000 SOL ($525,000) in trading volume, followed by Claynosaurz and Foxbyte.

In May, the Solana Foundation launched NFT Showdown, a competition for NFTs aiming to impact “real-world” industries such as gaming, entertainment, or fashion.

The competition’s judges are currently reviewing submissions based on their business model, focus on users, creativity, use of Solana technology, and real-world applications. The 10 highest-scoring collections will emerge as finalists.

Solana Suffers During Bear Market

Solana and its ecosystem took a thorough beating during the recent bear market.

Solana quickly grew in popularity during 2021 for its high speed, which it achieved at the expense of network centralization. While a wide range of hardware can validate most permissionless blockchains, hefty technical requirements resulted in Solana’s validators mostly comprising data center operators.

After rocketing from $1.5 at the start of 2021 to more than $250 nine months later, Solana’s native SOL token traded as low as $8 in January, according to The Defiant terminal.

In November 2022, the spectacular collapse of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange and Alameda Research trading company drove a further 65% crash for SOL.

Solana’s DeFi ecosystem also crumbled, crashing from $10B in November 2021 to less than $1B one year later, fire tanking a further 70% within three weeks of FTX’s failure, according to DeFi Llama.

The Solana Foundation had invested hundreds of millions into the native tokens of FTX and other SBF-backed projects in addition to shares in the defunct exchange, meaning FTX’s failure resulted in heavy losses for the organization.

Solana’s performance has also been hindered by its frequent outages, although a planned overhaul is expected to improve the reliability of the network.