Solana on XP.NETWORK bridge: New opportunities for projects and collectors

Solana on XP.NETWORK bridge: New opportunities
for projects and collectors

Solana on XP.NETWORK
bridge: New opportunities
for projects and collectors

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Solana has one of the largest NFT ecosystems out there, so it was only a matter of time till we added it to our powerful NFT bridge. Here’s what you need to know about the integration and the current state of NFTs on Solana.

solana.com

Solana: the key advantages for NFTs

Solana probably needs no introduction: everyone still remembers the ‘SOL summer’ of 2021. And even during the bear market, it remains the only blockchain that habitually processes over 3,000 transactions per second. True, the majority of these are validator votes, but the level of activity in Solana is still higher than in most other chains. For example, Avalanche rarely processes more than 350 TPS.

The average time to finality (TTF) on Solana is around 3-5 seconds: that’s how much time it should take for your transaction (be it sending tokens or minting an NFT) to get the necessary 12 confirmations.

This isn’t the fastest TTF in the industry: for example, Aptos – another L1 chain that we are about to integrate into XP.NETWORK – has a time to finality of less than 1 second. Still, 5 seconds is far better than the 5-10 minutes that are needed on Ethereum.

Solana is secured by around 1,900 validators, so it’s also a very decentralized network. For comparison: BNB Chain has just 21 validators.

Apart from the high TPS and low TTF, Solana has another big advantage for NFTs: very low fees. Expect to pay around $0.0003 per transaction – that’s far less than on Polygon or BNB Chain and even less than on Aptos.

A lot has been said about Solana’s outages and how they have been detrimental to the price and the ecosystem. Indeed, every two or three months the network goes down for hours at a time: the last blackout happened in October 2022. However, it’s not a reason not to use NFTs on Solana, as the advantages outweigh the risks. Plus, a blackout presents problems mostly to traders and borrowers, since they can get liquidated. If you just want to mint and flip NFTs, it shouldn’t be an issue.

Finally, Solana has been supported by OpenSea since April 2022. This made trading NFTs on Solana that much easier, even though many still prefer Solana-native marketplaces like Magic Eden.

NFTs on Solana are on the rise

NFTs on Solana
are on the rise

2022 was a difficult year for the NFT market, but Solana is one of the few ecosystems that have seen a dramatic increase in NFT trading volumes in the past months. While the overall organic volume across all chains fell 8% in November, on Solana it jumped by 42%, according to DappRadar.

Interestingly, most of this activity came from Magic Eden and not from OpenSea. Actually, the introduction of Solana support on OpenSea didn’t produce as big an effect as some predicted: in the past 30 days, the volume on Magic Eden was almost 300 times higher, with almost 35 times more active traders. DeGods remains the top-trading collection on Solana; it is also one of the top 20 collections overall, on any network (no.13), together with another Solana project, y00ts (no.20). It is the latter that has been driving the surge in NFT trading activity, reaching no.1 in weekly volume at the end of December.

Y00ts is a collection of 15,000 generative PFPs, and though they haven’t been revealed yet, one has already sold for over $6k.

The rest of the top 10 on Solana includes FRAKT (a collection of generative fractal art), Solana Monkey Business, Pixus Metaverse and others – here is the full list with the 30-day volumes.

Using Solana with XP.NETWORK: new opportunities for projects and collectors

At XP.NETWORK, we believe that Solana's best years are still in the future. It did go through a hype cycle and then lost most of the capitalization, but this in itself is a typical first stage on the adoption curve. After hype and disillusionment come to a more mature stage – hopefully with fewer scams and more stable performance. In terms of speed and fees, Solana is perfectly adapted for NFTs, so for us, it was never a question that we should support it.

XP.NETWORK has already integrated several non-EVM chains, such as Elrond and Tezos, and we’ve received a great response from their NFT communities. We keep getting new requests to bridge whole collections to Polygon and Ethereum, as well as VeChain.

We expect the same to happen with Solana: a surge of cross-chain activity, with Ethereum-based GameFi and metaverse projects migrating to Solana, but also Solana collections expanding to Polygon to attract new liquidity and users.

For now, Solana is available on testnet: http://bridge.xp.network/testnet. You can connect with Phantom or Solflare - just make sure that they are set to Solana testnet. You’ll also need some testnet SOL to pay the gas fees: you can get them for free from a faucet (here or here).

For you as a regular NFT user, this means an opportunity to try bridging between the biggest EVM and non-EVM blockchains. Once the integration is complete, you’ll just need to connect your wallet (MetaMask, Phantom, etc.) - depending on the origin chain. Next, you’ll need to pick an NFT and enter the recipient address. All the fees will be calculated and charged in the currency of the origin chain.

And by the way, don’t forget that XP.NETWORK now supports Unstoppable Domains, so if you have a Web3 domain name with them, you can use it to connect to the NFT bridge!

Integrate bridge to your dApp in less than 60 min

Get in touch

We have more blockchain integrations coming up, so do give XP.NETWORK a follow on Twitter or Telegram. And of course, try our powerful NFT bridge that lets you transfer NFTs securely between 20+ supported chains.