Solana Clears 100 Billion Transaction Count As NFTs Gain Prominence

The Solana network had been one of the winners of 2021 after gaining widespread popularity among crypto users. Its incredibly fast transaction times had been one of the pulls, as well as the ability for developers to create decentralized applications (DApps) on the network. Since the beginning of 2022, the network has been racing toward an important milestone, which it has now successfully broken through. 

Solana’s transaction count had been ramping up over the last couple of months. In just 2 years, it has become one of the most used blockchains in the space. Solana had taken the decentralized finance (DeFi) and non-fungible tokens (NFTs) space by storm, now commanding the second-largest market share of the NFT space of any blockchain.

Last week, the network made it past the 100 billion transaction mark. Interestingly, the network is still in Beta testing, and it has grown so much. It had been able to grow above the delay transaction count of its largest competitor Ethereum after it clocked more than 40 million daily transactions. 

Solana continues to maintain its high transaction processing even with the massive growth it has experienced. At the time of this writing, the transactions per second (TPS) in the last 30 minutes were averaging around 3,000 TPS, according to data from Solana Explorer.

Ethereum NFTs had been the dominant tokens in the market and, understandably, remain so, even at this time. However, there have been numerous developments in the Solana NFT ecosystem that shows that the network is gearing up to rival Ethereum in this regard.

One of the most recent NFT launches on the Solana blockchain, the y00ts NFT collection, is now billed as the “most hyped” NFT launch in history. It came from a critically acclaimed team behind the Dead Gods NFT collection. It sparked renewed interest in SOL NFTs, which helped to push the floor price higher.

On Monday, Sentiment reported that SOL NFT sales had crossed 1.65 million. Solana NFT ecosystem Metaplex had also reported a significant uptick in the number of NFTs that are being minted on the platform over the month of September. 

However, it is hard to predict how long this growth trend will last, given that interest in the NFT space, in general, is down. The number of new addresses that are using NFTs since its peak in mid-September is down more than 60%, from 30k to 8k.

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