SOL’s NFT Dominance Sees New Highs of $1B – Thanks to YOU
The market’s 9th largest cryptocurrency (SOL) has seen it all here. From heading north and hitting new ATHs to diving south by succumbing to network outages.
However, one aspect of SOL’s dominance continues to see bullish progress within various playgrounds/battlegrounds.
A beautiful skyline
Many investors/traders have something to appreciate amid the broader crypto market’s inconsistent movements.
Consider this – Solana’s Non-fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem has just passed a significant milestone. According to CryptoSlam, the Solana blockchain surpassed $1 billion in all-time total volume this month for the first time.
At the time of writing, the sales volume was around $1.2 billion, with the same highlighted by the graph attached here. 
Source: CryptoSlam Solana has actually established itself as a major player within this competitive market. In fact, according to Messari’s latest blog, one specific project aided the flagship protocol’s ascension to the aforementioned milestone.
Launched in 2021, Metaplex became the main protocol and permissionless infrastructure layer for NFTs on Solana. Since its launch, the Metaplex on-chain minting program has powered over 16 million of the 18 million NFTs minted on Solana. Well, thanks to Candy Machine V1 (launching in late August 2021) and V2 (launching in December 2021).
Other NFT minting solutions such as LaunchMyNFT and Magic Eden’s Launchpad (V1 and V2) also played an important role. Overall, the number of NFTs minted increased by 46% QoQ in Q2 2022.
Source: Messari
In addition, Metaplex witnessed a daily average of nearly 76,000 owners of Metaplex-enabled NFTs buying or selling an NFT each day. This marked an increase of 21% from the previous quarter. Furthermore, the average number of daily transactions increased by 18% QoQ.
Source: Messari
Overall, “the increase in the number of unique wallet addresses and NFT transactions on Solana shows daily healthy usage activity for the Metaplex network,” Messari added.
Such datasets outline a positive trajectory for the flagship blockchain network, especially looking at its progress. For example, in 2021 Solana’s highest weekly trading volume reached $160.39 million. Preferably a small percentage of the record today.
The ecosystem recently too updated community about the increasing active addresses on Solana’s dApps. Gaming platform Gameta topped these charts with over 50,11,000 users, as discussed in a previous article.
No signs of fading?
Solana talked about bullish scenarios on the mentioned green NFT card. However, there are still signs of uncertainty. Lately, a series of negative incidents, including repeated network outages, centralization concerns, and a widespread exploit, have targeted the Solana wallets.
These were all major setbacks for SOL investors. In fact, they may be the reason why SOL’s price did not quite perform as expected. At press time, SOL was trading just shy of the $48 mark on CoinMarketCap.
