Solana’s Best NFT Projects DeGods and Y00ts to Migrate Chains
After months of speculation that DeGods and Y00ts, two of the top Solana non-fungible token (NFT) projects, would leave the SOL ecosystem, the team behind the projects confirmed the migration on Twitter Sunday.
DeGods will move to Ethereum and Y00ts will move to Polygon in early Q1, the team said.
“There is an argument that can be made for that [DeGods] has reached Solana,” project leader Rohun Vora, known as Sincere, said in a Monday Twitter Spaces. “It’s hard to accept, but it’s been tough to grow at the rate we want to grow. If Ethereum is where we need to go to continue to grow, that’s what we need to do.”
The collections are two of the liveliest in the Solana NFT market, with DeGods having a floor price of 515 SOL (around $5,750) at the time of writing, the largest in the ecosystem. Y00ts, DeGod’s sister PFP collection released this fall, has a floor of 148 SOL (around $1,660).
Sales of DeGods surged following the news, with the collection’s floor price up 12% as of Monday. Sales for Y00ts have remained relatively calm, and the floor has increased by only 5 SOL (around $55). In the week prior to the announcement, sales of DeGods and Y00ts accounted for nearly 70% of all Solana NFT sales volume, according to data from Magic Eden.
The move was preceded by months of excitement on NFT Twitter, with some developers in the Solana NFT area denouncing the exit while the collection’s holders largely cheered the move.
In early December at the Art Basel festival in Miami, rumors circulated on Twitter that the DeGods team asked the Solana Foundation for $5 million to stay at SOL. A Solana Foundation representative confirmed the figure to CoinDesk, though the DeGods team declined to comment on the validity of the request.
Another win for Polygon
Y00ts’ move to Polygon came at a price. A DeGods representative told CoinDesk that Polygon paid for the move with a grant from the partnership fund, and details of the deal will be released in due course.
Vora said the grant will last “one year, maybe two” and was not paid up front. It is unclear what will happen when the grant expires.
“There are a lot of milestones we have to reach,” Vora said. “And the subsidy is not as much as people think.”
The migration is the latest in Polygon’s winning streak of partnerships – the layer 2 blockchain has attracted partners as big as Starbucks, Nike, Reddit, Instagram and DraftKings in the past year.
On the flip side, DeGod’s move to Ethereum and Polygon could be complicated. It’s rare to see high-profile NFT bridges on this scale – when projects go multi-chain, it’s usually along the lines of Doodles, which is considering launching Doodles 2 on a layer 2 blockchain while keeping its original collection on Ethereum.
The details of the migration’s technical elements have yet to be announced, but the team has said that Y00tpoints, a token given to Y00ts holders who stake their NFTs, will also transfer chains.
“What’s the worst case scenario here? An exploitation of the bridge contract, said Vora about the technical challenges of the move. “We want to do [the migration] as soon as possible, shooting for Q1, but we have to make sure it is airtight. Bridges is notorious for problems around things like this.”
