The Solana NFTs are moving into new boundaries this month. You’d recall that OpenSea announced the integration of Solana NFTs on its platform last week. Today, Rarible has also announced that Solana NFTs are now live on the Rarible protocol.
Per an official press release from Rarible, Solana-minted NFTs are now tradable on the Rarible NFT marketplace. But the process will be completed over the next couple of weeks. Since Rarible is more of a protocol than an NFT marketplace, other project creators can use it to create their custom platforms.
Solana is the latest blockchain added to the Rarible protocol. Others include Ethereum, Polygon, Flow, and Tezos. Rarible’s native token (RARI) would be used as a payment system across the multi-chain system.
Rarible Makes More Progress
Besides announcing support for Solana NFTs, the Rarible team also revealed that it has established a separate marketplace for degenerate ape Academy (DAA), a top Solana project. This unique marketplace was developed with Rarible’s white-label technology and will host all data projects, including its NFT projects such as degenerate ape kindergarten and degenerate trash pandas.
One of the reasons for using Rarible’s white-label tech is to automate the transfer of a specific percentage of sales to the project’s DAO. It isn’t surprising that Rarible has integrated Solana’s NFTs into its protocol.
One of the protocol’s founders, Alexei Falin, had revealed in a November 2021 interview that Solana was one of the blockchains that Rarible has scheduled to integrate into its protocol. He also announced that the development team had initiated the integration process.
During that interview, Falin further revealed that Solana’s integration would happen this year because the team was solely focused on integrating Tezos and Polygon blockchains at that time. However, the polygon integration only happened last month after several postponements. Per multiple reports, the NFT trade volume for 2021 was estimated at $27B. However, more than 70% of those trades happened on Ethereum and its layer-2 scaling solutions.
Since the beginning of last year, especially in the second half of last year, Solana’s NFT marketplace has grown so fast that it has become the second-biggest NFT platform behind Ethereum. The fast growth of this marketplace rests on the back of top projects such as Aurory, degenerate ape academy, and Solana monkey business. Also, portals and Magic Eden metaverse platforms contributed to the rapid success of the Solana NFT marketplace.
Solana Is Still Behind Ethereum
Despite its recent integrations with Ethereum and Rarible, Solana’s NFT marketplace is still far behind Ethereum in NFT trade volumes. Unfortunately, trade volumes on Solana NFTs dipped by 11% this past week, per the Cryptoslam report.
These stats prove that the OpenSea-Solana integration hasn’t had the expected positive impact the NFT ecosystem had hoped. Nonetheless, this week Magic Eden data shows that OpenSea only processed nearly $1.38M worth of Solana NFT trade volumes over the past seven days.
