Solana continues to fight for its place among the best smart contracts-backed platforms after reaching new milestones with regard to the biggest blockchains by all-time NFT sales volume.
Solana has been labeled as a potential Ethereum Killer after becoming one of the few protocols that has found an answer to the blockchain trilemma (security, decentralized, and scalability).
In a little over two years, Solana has become one of the go-to chains for non-fungible tokens (NFTs). According to Be[In]Crypto research, Solana had a total sales volume of around $2.35 billion, as of June 5.
This comes to give the project a boost after its native asset, SOL, fell by more than $14 billion in market capitalization in May.
The milestone puts Solana in third place behind Ronin and Ethereum.
That said, Solana commands a higher historical sales volume than Flow, Polygon, WAX, Avalanche, Palm, Tezos, Waves, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), and Panini.
What caused soaring Solana sales volume?
When looking at the increasing number of unique buyers from October 2021, the surge in sales led to the blockchain’s ascending total transaction counts totaling 83,697 unique buyers and 374,618 transactions. By the end of October, Solana’s sales volume was in the region of $286.4 million.
A spike of 83% in the number of unique buyers from October led to a new all-time high in the number of new NFT buyers on Solana in January 2022. In January 2022, unique buyers were 153,602, which corresponded to 1,014,963 transactions. Coincidentally, this month also happened to be Solana’s highest monthly sales volume at around $298.69 million.
Popular NFTs on Solana that contributed to this volume include but are not limited to Chainers, Thug Birdz, Meerkat Millionaire Country Club, Frakt, Portals, Solsteads, Cosmic Condos, SolPunks, Blockstars, Akuma no Neko, Infinity Labs, and Solarians.
Other months that made notable contributions to Solana sales were September 2021 ($263.34 million), February 2022 ($206.3 million), April 2022 ($294.8 million), and May 2022 ( $256.1 million).
SOL price reaction
SOL opened on Jan. 1, 2022, with a trading price of $170.31, reached a yearly high of $179.43 on Jan. 2, and tested a new local low of $38.36 on June 2. SOL was trading at $40 at the time of press.
Overall, this equates to a 77% decline in the price of SOL throughout 2022.
