Solana NFT Ecosystem Shines, But DeFi Remains Muted: Report

Solana’s NFT ecosystem continued to show resilience amid a bear market. Data from Messari noted that the total number of daily new NFT users grew by more than 8 million, over a 19% increase on a QoQ basis.

“For perspective, this Q3 growth followed a 46.4% increase in Q2 and is ~8.5 times the level seen a year ago,” the tweet said.

The report attributed Solana’s NFT progress to fundamental factors such as a fundamental user base, network stability and improved transaction activity that drove network value during the third quarter.

Sol’s position in the NFT sector remained the second largest by secondary sales volume, behind Ethereum, narrowing the gap. Strategies to grow GameFi are underway, and unique use cases like Helium are coming to the Solana network. Work to improve decentralization through greater geographical distribution, hosting and ownership distribution continues.

The report also highlighted the continued optimization of Metaplex’s Digital Asset Standard which it claimed played a key role in strengthening the network’s NFT ecosystem.

As reported by TronWeekly, the NFT market recently announced to cut its workforce due to the ripple effects of the FTX shockwaves.

In the 2nd quarter, SOL suffered many network outages and problems with gas charges during periods of congestion. To overcome these problems, kernel developers have rolled out QUIC and a new model of fee prioritization.

“The solutions were clearly working by the end of Q2 as degraded network performance stabilized,” the report claimed. These along with Solana Pay and Solana mobile have expanded the ecosystem, it added.

That said, the report noted the network’s muted performance in the DeFi sector.

Solana’s total value for the third quarter locked [TVL] fell by approx. 16% both in USD and SOL QoQ. But according to the data platform, a healthy distribution of TVL across applications still exists.

“Currently, 50% of TVL is locked across most of the long-tailed DeFi protocols on the network. The continued level of diversified TVL helps reduce overall ecosystem risk.”

Solana Roadmap: New updates on the horizon

According to GitHub, the latest mainnet version is the SOL network v1. 10.29which attempted to fix various bugs along with Neon and Nitro.

While Neon Lab’s goal is to provide both scalability and low transaction costs, Nitro, on the other hand, is a Solana Virtual Machine [SVM]-compatible blockchain that will act as a bridge between Solana and Cosmos.