The rise of NFTs as an asset class has been a bubble that seemingly refuses to pop, but NFT marketplaces are still courting investor attention, especially around opportunities that appear to be undiscovered by market leaders. Increased attention has been given to the Solana's NFT opportunity.
On Friday, Justin Kan's gaming marketplace, which hosts Solana-based NFTs, raised $35 million in a round co-led by Paradigm and Multicoin with participation from Animoca, Coinbase and Solana Labs. The round came two weeks after Solana's most popular native NFT storefront, Magic Eden, raised a $27M round led by Paradigm.
One of the bolder success stories of the network in recent years has been Solana, which offers consumers low-cost transaction fees and increased speeds. Many players see the layer 1 alternative as a better hub for NFT efforts which have often been a drag on the network, leading to hefty fees and wait times across the entire network.
We started with Solana because we thought it was the best user experience for users.
Justin Kan debuts Fractal, a Solana-based marketplace for gaming NFTs
The attention has attracted new investment in Solana NFT startup. Last week, OpenSea shared on its website that it will be adding support for the Solana block chain in the coming weeks.
The lion's share of NFT sales goes to OpenSea. The startup has reached a $13.3 billion valuation, but it still has a lot of work to do to build enthusiasm for the technology among mainstream consumers. Over the last 30 days, the platform has transacted over $2 billion, but it was spread across 450k unique wallets, a major increase for the platform. OpenSea's total volumes are larger than MagicEden's, but MagicEden's 95k active traders signal a platform with rising user.
One of the biggest questions will be how curation factors into the continued challenges of NFT marketplaces in dealing with spam.
For the past several years, OpenSea has relied heavily on the expenses associated with minting NFTs on Ethereum as a means of promoting its marketplace. Over the past year, they have tried to reduce fees by offering a more streamlined process called lazy minting, but in January they had to rein in the feature due to the fact that 80 percent of the NFTs created using it. With reduced fees, Solana will likely accelerate some of these issues for large marketplaces and force them to build out more robust content filters, leaving room for upstarts with better defined niches or more aggressive curation tactics.
Solana, a blockchain platform followed by top crypto investors, says it’s far faster than Ethereum
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