Solana (SOL) continues to work on defining its own position in the crypto industry after the crash of the crypto exchange FTX. The NFT division is as much a focus as Decentralised Finance (DeFi).
Solana (SOL) has become the problem child of many investors since the collapse of the FTX empire in November 2022, its close ties to Sam Bankman-Fried’s companies having proved troublesome. But Solana is not stuck and SOL’s price curve has trended positively in 2023, partly due to increasing interest in its NFTs division. Two news items in recent days support the optimism:
1. the NFT platform Crossmint is expanding its services towards Solana NFTs and has already launched a beta programme for this. Crossmint advertises that it will significantly simplify the creation and storage of NFTs and use innovative compression techniques. So there could be opportunities here for Solana NFTs to open up new user groups and use cases.
2. In the summer of 2022, Solana had launched an initiative entirely tailored to mobile experiences with SOL, including its own smartphones. The associated software was open-source from the start, and now Solana has also released the detailed blueprints for smartphones and is encouraging people via Twitter to use them to build their own hardware. In Solana’s mobile package, the NFTs division is natively integrated.
According to CryptoSlam, the market overview of trading in NFTs shows that NFTs based on Ethereum (ETH) dominate the action, but Solana NFTs have settled in second place. In the important metrics of daily turnover and buyers, Ethereum NFTs are ahead of Solana by a factor of about five, so there is room to catch up here. On the other hand, the new market leader among NFT trading platforms, Blur, is not yet willing to list Solana NFTs, and so the momentum also sparked by the token BLUR is passing SOL by.
Before the FTX crash, decentralised finance (DeFi) was the main use case for Solana, but the data from DeFiLlama has long been sobering. Just $250 million TVL is still recorded by Solana in the DeFi line and even slight gains last month did not create momentum. Here the mistrust in SOL seems to be particularly deep-seated and the repeated network failures cast doubt on the practicality of Solana for DeFi.
Conclusion: Solana in search of itself
SOL’s freefall seems to have stopped in 2023 and the Solana community is showing loyalty, enabling its successes in the NFT space. But given SOL’s nearly $9 billion market cap, daily Solana NFT sales of a few million dollars are too little to answer all future questions. Thus, Solana will predictably have to continue to work on sharpening its image after FTX and proactively occupy application fields.
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