In May, the overall performance of the NFT market was sluggish, and the trading volume of OpenSea (Ethereum chain) fell by 31.6% from the previous month.
In the sluggish market, the Solana NFT market ushered in explosive growth. In May, the transaction volume of Magic Eden increased by 39.79% month-on-month, and OpenSea (Solana chain) increased by 286.02% month-on-month. NFT projects such as Okay Bears, Trippin Ape Tribe, and DeGods are extremely popular on social media.
There are three main reasons for the boom in the Solana NFT market: Solanas own high performance and mature ecology, emphasis on community building, and cultivation of meme culture.
As a public chain with high performance and mature ecological development, Solana has attracted more and more NFT projects to complete the deployment. Currently, more than 900 NFT projects have been deployed on the Solana chain.
The Solana NFT project focuses on the rights and interests of NFT holders and community building. Many NFT projects build communities with NFT holders as the core, providing NFT holders with high-quality rights and interests such as community-limited rights, future airdrops, and partner event rewards.
The culture behind NFT PFP projects has always been the focus of these projects. The cultural recognition of NFT PFP by the community promotes the sales and community communication of these projects, which is one of the reasons why Okay Bears became popular.
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(1) NFT market situation
The number of users and transaction volume of the Solana NFT market ushered in explosive growth in May.
Take Magic Eden and OpenSea (Solana chain) as examples. Magic Eden is the largest NFT trading platform on the Solana chain. In May, the transaction volume was about 574 million US dollars, a month-on-month increase of 39.79%.
OpenSea (Solana chain), which ranks second in terms of transaction volume, had a transaction volume of approximately US$44 million in May, a month-on-month increase of 286.02%.
During the same period, the Ethereum NFT market was cold. The trading volume of OpenSea (Ethereum chain) in May was 2.38 billion US dollars, down 31.6% from the 3.48 billion US dollars in April.
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(2) Popularity of NFT projects on the Solana chain
Among the top 15 projects in the 30-day trading volume displayed on the OpenSea homepage, NFTs on the Solana chain occupy two seats, among which the trading volume of Okay Bears ranks among the top ten, with a monthly trading volume exceeding 1.06 million SOL.
Except for Okay Bears and Trippin Ape Tribe, the trading volume of top Solana NFTs has seen a significant increase in the last 30 days.
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(3) Community popularity
According to the data at 12:00 on June 2, the number of tweets containing solana nfts within one hour was 790, while the number of tweets containing ethereum nfts was 410, which shows the popularity of the Solana NFT project on Twitter.
The leading NFT project on the Solana chain has established a huge community. Among the top ten projects with 30-day trading volume, Trippin Ape Tribe and Genopet have more than 100,000 Discord members, and the top ten projects each have 20,000 Discord members above.
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(1) Overall data
The data shows that the 30-day total transaction volume of mainstream NFT trading platforms on the Solana chain is about 5.42 million SOL, of which Magic Eden has a transaction volume of 5 million SOL, accounting for 92.2%, and is the absolute leader of the Solana NFT trading platform.
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(2) Functions and representative projects of the NFT trading platform
Organize 11 mainstream Solana NFT trading platforms, the main functions include the following 6 types:
-Online NFT project
-Secondary market transactions and auctions
-NFT data statistics
-NFT minting calendar
-Game asset trading and game display
-NFT aggregation transaction
Representative projects of secondary market transactions: Magic Eden, SolSea, Solanart;
Representative projects of NFT transaction aggregator: Coral Cube, Hyperspace;
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3. Top NFT project types
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(1) Pure PFP
The pure PFP project issues a certain number of avatar-like NFTs. These NFTs have no additional functions except for collection and trading. Pure PFP projects occupy the largest proportion in the NFT market. The top two NFT transactions on the Solana chain, Okay Bears and Trippin Ape Tribe, are typical pure PFP projects.
1. Okay Bears
Introduction: Okay Bears consists of NFTs of 10,000 bears, known as Calm Bears. The roadmap of the Okay Bears team is divided into 7 parts: The Park, Workshop, Gallery, Studio, Boutique, Bear Market and Platform. The team hopes to develop these 7 parts together with community members.
-The Park: Discord channel, accessible to Okay Bear NFT holders.
-Workshop: expand the channel of the brand, including cooperating with other communities and brands to organize activities.
-Gallery: encrypted art gallery.
-Studio: User has access to future collectibles, artwork, community Lo-Fi albums, and more.
-Boutique: Make exclusive items and limited edition collectibles.
-Bear Market: An ecosystem for NFT holders.
-Platform: interactive and development platform.
30-day sales volume: 1.116 million SOL
Floor price: 147 SOL
2. Trippin’ Ape Tribe
Introduction: Trippin Ape Tribe is an NFT PFP project built around the community, consisting of 10,000 ape NFTs. The project party welcomes the establishment of strategic partnerships with like-minded brands and collaborators to expand the community scale and brand influence.
30-day sales volume: 419,000 SOL
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(2) NFT with pledge function
NFT holders obtain token rewards by staking NFT, and the design of the staking function provides NFT holders with additional benefits. The introduction of tokens in the NFT PFP project allows NFT holders to trade both NFTs in the secondary market and tokens in the secondary market. Famous Fox Federation and Jikan are representative projects of this type.
The Famous Fox Federation consists of 7,800 cartoon fox NFTs. NFT holders can obtain FOXY tokens by staking NFTs. The 30-day transaction volume of the project is 59,000 SOL, and the number of holders is 4,223.
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(3) Game Avatar
Game avatars refer to characters that exist in the form of NFT in the game. Players can participate in the game by purchasing character NFT to get rewards. Genopet is a representative project of this type.
Genopet is an NFT-based M2E application. Genesis Genopet holders earn XP through real-world exercise, improve Genopets combat performance, and endow it with unique attributes.
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(4) NFT Pass
NFT Pass is an equity NFT issued by the project party. Holding an NFT Pass can unlock specific rights and interests, including obtaining management tools, joining the Discord community, and obtaining priority rights and interests. Moonly and SolRarity are representative projects of this type.
Moonly is an NFT data analysis platform. Moonly NFT holders obtain limited rights such as analysis tools and management tools. The 30-day trading volume is 30,000 SOL.
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(5) Metaverse related NFT
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(6) Judging criteria for high-quality projects: innovation, community, and practicality
When selecting an NFT project, it needs to be measured from three dimensions: innovation, community and practicality.
Innovation: whether the project has heavy traces of plagiarism, and whether there are new selling points in the project design.
Community: The number of members and activity of the projects self-operated community, and whether it is biased towards building projects around the community.
Practicality: Whether the project has a liquidity plan and whether it has high playability.
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4. Advantages of Solana public chain: high TPS and mature ecology
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(1) High TPS
Magic Eden data shows that Solanas TPS is above 2000, that is, processing more than 2000 transactions per second.
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(2) Mature ecology
Solana’s official website shows that there are currently more than 2,000 applications deployed on the Solana chain, covering wallets, oracles, DEX, lending applications, chain games, NFT, etc. As a leader in the new public chain, Solana ecological application provides auxiliary tools and partner support for NFT projects.
NFT project parties can find high-performance DeFi applications, SocialFi applications, and Metaverse applications to integrate with them. The wallet supported by the Solana chain provides NFT holders and project parties with NFT storage places.
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5. Root cause of Solana NFT explosion: community building
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(1) Build an NFT community with NFT holders as the core
NFT holders are the core members of the community. The NFT project actively maintains the relationship with NFT holders, taking into account the needs of NFT holders when designing roadmaps and functions.
For example, among the 7 modules of the Okay Bears roadmap, Studio allows users to access future collectibles, artwork, community Lo-Fi albums, and more. Bear Market is an ecosystem built for NFT holders, providing value-added services for NFT holders.
In this process, in addition to holding NFT, NFT holders can also enjoy the benefits brought by inter-community cooperation, keep abreast of the future plans of the NFT project, and obtain additional benefits from the new functions of the NFT project.
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(2) Extensive rights and interests of NFT holders
There are three main categories of NFT holders’ rights and interests: pledge NFT to obtain tokens, hold NFT Pass to obtain exclusive rights and interests, and other rights and rewards provided by NFT projects.
1. Pledge NFT to get tokens
The pledge function is a liquidity solution provided by the NFT PFP project, and token rewards are obtained through pledge mining. To get token rewards, you must hold NFT and participate in staking. The staking function increases the number of NFT holders and the amount of staking.
2. Hold NFT Pass to get exclusive benefits
NFT Pass grants holders the qualification to unlock advanced benefits, which include:
① Obtain the asset management rights and whitelist tools of the data analysis platform;
② Become a core member of the community;
③Obtain the whitelist qualification for future NFT issuance of NFT projects, mint price discounts and other rights and interests.
High-quality benefits are an important reason for attracting users to purchase NFT Pass.
3. Other benefits and rewards provided by NFT projects
Solanas head NFT project will bring some benefits to community members in the process of cooperating with other high-quality communities.
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(3) meme culture
The NFT PFP project is compatible with the meme culture, and the interpretation of the image and the overall narrative of NFT PFP can resonate with some people.
For example, Okay Bear (calm bear), there is such a sentence in the introduction of the official website, here, you can be an ordinary person. No matter what happens, they always reply Okay in a flat manner, which makes calm bears easy to be used in social media to express emotions such as dont panic and lie down.
In the process, the interaction between Okay Bear and social media contributed to the explosion of Okay Bear.
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6. The hidden worries of Solana NFT
There are two main concerns about Solana NFT: the lack of innovation in the NFT PFP project, and the duration of the popularity remains to be seen.
1. NFT PFP lacks innovation
The lack of innovation in NFT PFP has been a problem for a long time. The images of NFT PFP projects are mainly robots, monsters, characters, and animals. The similar style of painting leads to aesthetic fatigue of players, and the interest in collecting NFT PFP declines.
If NFT PFP has no other functions other than avatars and transactions, the popularity will tend to decline rapidly.
There are imitations of BAYC, MAYC, CryptoPunks and Okay Bears on the Solana chain. These imitations are highly similar to the original IP, and the project design is relatively rough.
2. The heat retention time remains to be seen
At present, the NFT projects on the Solana chain are mainly pure PFP. The overall downturn of the NFT PFP market, the lack of innovative gameplay and the shorter and shorter average collection time make it questionable how long the popularity of NFT PFP projects can be maintained.
Select two popular projects Okay Bears and Trippin Ape Tribe, the floor prices of the two did not drop significantly, and the 7-day trading volume fell by 41.68% and 81.33% month-on-month respectively. The transaction volume of NFT projects is difficult to maintain a stable growth for a long time, but changes according to events and market sentiment, so the transaction volume of old projects often soars.
High-quality NFT projects, combined with high-quality marketing strategies, can quickly become popular, but how long the wave of popularity can last depends on the work of the project party and the test of the market.
