on the crypto
Although the recent downturn in the cryptocurrency market has weighed heavily on Solana's fortunes (quotation SOL), this company still has one of the brightest long-term prospects among smaller cryptocurrencies looking to challenge the two market heavyweights: Bitcoin and Ethereum. By market capitalization, Solana is now in ninth place among all cryptocurrencies and may be one of the few coins that can survive a protracted "crypto winter".
Solana's main claim is that it has developed a leadership position in the non-fungible token (NFT) market, building a robust ecosystem of investors, developers, artists and designers committed to its long-term future. It is currently the second blockchain for NFT trading, after only Ethereum. At the same time, Solana continues to present innovative new use cases for the Solana blockchain, ranging from blockchain gaming (GameFi) to decentralized finance (DeFi).
Solana's leading role in the NFT market
The opportunity to invest in Solana starts from the growing importance of SOL in the NFT space, which remains one of the most promising sectors in the world of cryptocurrencies. At one time, Ethereum was the dominant player in the NFT world. All of the biggest NFT projects - including Bored Apes and CryptoKitties - have been minted on the Ethereum blockchain and Ethereum has dominated NFT sales on popular markets like OpenSea.
But something happened in April that appears to have broken Ethereum's grip on the NFT market: OpenSea has begun listing the NFTs minted on the Solana blockchain. As OpenSea is one of the largest, most influential and popular NFT markets, this has opened up the Solana NFT market to a larger group of buyers and sellers, who previously relied on smaller, lesser-known markets such as Magic Eden to find new Solana NFTs. Simply put, OpenSea's decision to list Solana's NFTs brought more attention than ever to the Solana blockchain and also gave Solana an implicit seal of approval. In late May, Solana hit a major milestone: She finally surpassed Ethereum in terms of overall NFT sales volume during a single 24-hour period with the launch of NFT's highly anticipated Trippin 'Ape Tribe collection.
Ethereum still makes nearly ten times Solana's NFT daily sales volume in an average day, but you can imagine Solana's vast potential if it continues to devote resources to its rapidly expanding NFT ecosystem. It just needs more Trippin 'Apes to compete with Ethereum's Bored Apes.
What's new under the sun for Solana?
Solana is certainly not a workhorse. Solana's developers are constantly proposing new innovative use cases for NFTs. A great example is STEPN, a lifestyle game / app built on the Solana blockchain that popularized the move-to-earn craze. Basically, you earn cryptocurrencies by walking or running every day. To do this, however, you need to buy an “NFT sneaker” on the Solana blockchain. This really broadens the idea of what an NFT can be: You can get paid to get fit by investing in a pair of digital running shoes. A real love at first sight. As long as Solana's developers continue to come up with ideas like this, SOL will be a very attractive long-term cryptocurrency.
If you add to the fact that Solana is putting serious money into new projects, the opportunity to invest in Solana becomes even stronger. For example, in June Solana announced a $ 100 million commitment to invest in South Korean metaverse, gaming, NFT and DeFi projects.
Sunny skies for Solana
Solana was first launched to the public in 2020. Within a few months, not only Crypto Twitter, but also the likes of CNBC and Bloomberg were talking about it as a potential Ethereum killer. Since Solana offered much faster processing speeds and much lower transaction fees than Ethereum, analysts predicted that users and developers would abandon Ethereum and switch to Solana. If this migration happened fast enough, Ethereum would become largely irrelevant, as all the coolest and most innovative blockchain projects would be built on the Solana blockchain.
Solana largely lived up to the hype surrounding her, with a few brief network outages in the past few months being the only real blemish on her record. While Solana has not yet supplanted Ethereum as the flagship blockchain for NFTs, she has established a solid foundation for a promising future involving NFTs, gaming applications, and other decentralized applications running on her super-fast, super-cheap blockchain.
