Solana NFT sales increase as traders farm for Tensor rewards
Non-fungible token (NFT) traders on Solana may move to newer projects, as the Forkast SOL NFT Composite fell this week while sales increased, an industry expert said.
Discard SOL NFT Composite – a measurement of the performance of the Solana NFT market through 100 smart contracts launched this week by Rejection. News and data partner CryptoSlam – fell 6.13% to 1,155.15 in the past seven days as of 3:30 p.m. in Hong Kong.
Sales on Solana, the second-largest NFT blockchain, increased 40.66% in the past week to $20.21 million, but the number of unique buyers for Solana NFTs shrank 86% to 12,113, according to data from CryptoSlam.
“The Forkast SOL NFT Composite being down may reflect the casino aspect of NFTs where traders are moving from the more established projects to the newer ones, but it may also show that some traders are simply cashing out,” said Yehudah Petscher, NFT Strategist at CryptoSlam.
Petscher added: “With the total weekly sales on Solana increasing, and the announcement of rewards from the Tensor market, it seems safe to assume that the Forkast SOL NFT Composite reflects traders trading in Tensor rewards.”
Activity on Tensor, a Solana NFT marketplace, began to pick up this week after it launched an airdrop on Monday as part of its rewards program, a model similar to what Ethereum NFT marketplace Blur has used to take customers and market shares from OpenSea.
About 21.63% of all Solana NFT trades were made on Tensor in the last 24 hours, compared to 53.51% on Magic Eden, the dominant marketplace on the blockchain, according to figures from Solana data aggregator Tiexo. Tensor was a little-known marketplace where less than 10% of Solana NFT trades occurred before it launched its Blur-inspired airdrop.
On Monday, Tensor said so raised $3 million in a seed round led by blockchain venture capital Placeholder.
“It’s hard not to root for just good old-fashioned competition,” Petscher said. “Since Tensor announced a $3 million raise and an upcoming airdrop of reward tokens, we’re seeing the markets react the same way they did to Ethereum with Blur.”
Petscher added that the method of marketplaces winning over traders with rewards worked. “Trader-friendly tools then give Tensor an identity that sets them apart from other marketplaces, and in this case, they’re tools that we’ve found to be preferred by traders (similar to Blur’s tools).”
Meanwhile, global NFT sales rose 1.73% over the past seven days to $188.2 million, with the number of unique buyers plunging 70.62% to 175,708, according to CryptoSlam data.
Outside of Solana, Yuga Labs, the creator of high-end gatherings like the Bored Ape Yacht Club, launched a new project on the Bitcoin blockchain, raising around $16.5 million through the sale of 288 NFTs in 24 hours. The “TwelveFold” collection, launched on Sunday, consists of 300 individual works of 3D-rendered art.
“Whether it’s having a stake in Bitcoin history with a low numbered inscription, or just having exposure to Yuga Labs, provenance is the real value here, and apparently it’s worth a lot,” Petscher wrote in a CryptoSlams Tuesday newsletter.
