OFTEN referred to as the Ethereum Killer, Solana surged nearly 15,000 per cent in 2021, becoming the fourth largest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation.
This means if you’d have invested $1,000 in January 2021 when SOL was trading at $1.53 your investment, by the end of 2021, would have been worth around $120,000.
The pros of Solana include lower gas fees, higher energy efficiency, and high scalability – all of which has led to more creators building NFT collections on Solana.
A Degenerate Ape NFT sold for around $1.1 million in September 2021, making it the network’s first million-dollar NFT sale.
This was followed by the $2 million sale of Solana Monkey #1355 in October 2021.
In February 2022, Solana saw $149 million in total NFT sales with an average price of $470 per transaction.
There were 316,000 transactions with 54,434 unique sellers and 81,793 unique buyers.
While the total sales volume fell from nearly $200 million in January 2022, this can be attributed to a decrease in overall interest in NFTs as well as the price of SOL falling by around 50 per cent from early January to February.
But the important trend to key an eye on is the increase in unique buyers.
The were 14,579 purchases in August 2021 compared to over 80,000 in February 2022 – an increase of over 500 per cent.
Total transactions also increased by a similar percentage, from 63,873 in August 2021 to 316,800 in February 2022.
This is important because it indicates more individuals are coming to the Solana NFT ecosystem instead of a few whales buying and selling among themselves.
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How to buy Solana NFTs
Before being able to purchase NFTs on Solana, you need a Solana wallet, SOL, and a Solana marketplace.
1) Set up a Solana wallet
As Solana NFTs are on the Solana blockchain, Ethereum wallets such as MetaMask are not compatible.
If you send SOL to MetaMask, it’s gone.
Instead, you need a Solana wallet such as Phantom, Solflare, or Sollet.
Phantom is currently the most popular.
To set up a Phantom wallet:
- Go to phantom.app/download and choose your browser – if you’re using Chrome, you can directly add the extension from the Chrome Web Store.
- Install the Phantom browser extension.
- Click ‘Create New Wallet’, save the recovery phrase, create a password, and click confirm.
2) Purchase SOL
You can buy SOL from any supported exchange such as Coinbase or Binance and send it to your wallet.
Alternatively, you could add USDT stablecoin to Phantom and exchange them for SOL within the wallet.
3) Find a Solana Marketplace to buy your Solana NFT
There are a number of Solana-based marketplaces you can look at.
Magic Eden is one of the most popular Solana NFT marketplaces, where you can create, buy and sell NFTs. They don’t charge a listing fee, but they do charge a transaction fee of 2 per cent.
Solanart is also a popular Solana NFT marketplace that allows anyone to create, buy and sell Solana NFTs.
For every successful NFT sale, Solanart charges a transaction fee of 3 per cent.
Other Solana NFT marketplaces include Solsea, DigitalEyes, Metaplex, Alpha.art, Exchange.Art, Artz, Solport and SupaDrop.
You now know how to buy a Solana NFT but you’re still not sure which one to buy?
Solana NFT projects to watch out for in 2022
Solana Monkey Business
Solana Monkey Business (SMB) is a collection of 5,000 24×24 pixel monkeys.
SMB is a community-focused NFT project with perks including access to an exclusive, members-only wallet and an on-chain voting system.
The project will also grant access to the MonkeDAO, Solana’s first NFT DAO.
Balloonsville 2.0
The original Balloonsville NFT project was a rugpull and scammed investors out of millions.
The team behind the original project blamed Magic Eden for not asking for an ID and asked the platform to refund investors.
As the original project gained so much interest, the community decided to launch a second version.
According to a recent tweet, Balloonsville will enable NFT holders to stake their NFTs in their metaverse and earn rewards in the form of AIR tokens.
The project is still in development.
Degenerate Ape Academy
On the Solana blockchain, Degenerate Ape Academy is a collection of 10,000 NFTs.
The Academy has a total of 137 qualities, ranging from common to mythic.
Portals
Portals is the NFT collection for a metaverse project built on Solana.
It features passes which will grant access to one of their exclusive buildings: Ivory, Onyx, or Vision.
Portals is a browser-based 3D metaverse that has been in development since early 2021.
Users can currently check out a demo for the Portals metaverse.
Galactic Gecko Space Garage
Galactic Gecko Space Garage is an ‘NFT Social Adventure Club’ with more than 10,000 geckos.
Buying a Gecko NFT gives you exclusive access to giveaways, meetups, merchandise, and more.
The Solana NFT art collection launched in September 2021 at a mint price of 2 SOL each.
SolPunks
Similar to CryptoPunks, SolPunks were one of the first NFTs collections to launch on Solana.
Each of these 10,000 SolPunks has unique attributes.
As always, do your own research before making any kind of investment.
