The Defiant

OpenSea Adds Solana to Its Quiver of Networks

The deal between OpenSea and Solana promises to scale both platforms.

By: Samuel Haig Loading...

OpenSea Adds Solana to Its Quiver of Networks

OpenSea is already the No. 1 NFT marketplace with $2.3B in monthly volume. Now it may be about to get a lot bigger.

OpenSea will launch on Solana, a leading rival to the Ethereum network, in April, the company tweeted on Tuesday. That will be OpenSea’s fourth network after Ethereum, Polygon, and Klaytn. Solana is a high-speed Layer 1 offering transaction fees equal to just fractions of a cent.

Shot in the Arm

The deal could be a shot in the arm for Solana. The network suffered six outages during the month of January. Solana’s leading cross-chain bridge, Wormhole, also lost $320M worth of Wrapped Ether to an exploit in early February. The funds were replaced by Solana ecosystem backer, Jump Crypto.

Not everyone is happy with OpenSea’s deal with the network.

Tezos supporters jumped in to express outrage that Tezos NFTs still have not been integrated on OpenSea. Almost 12 months ago, Tezos co-founder, Arthur Breitman, shared that OpenSea would support Tezos-based non fungibles in April of 2021 after receiving a grant from the Tezos Foundation.

“I’m old enough to remember when you took money from the Tezos Foundation,” said ‘Jesse_Altman’, referring to the grant of up to $200,000 that the foundation had earmarked in early 2021 for Ozone Networks, the U.S. company behind OpenSea, to integrate Tezos NFTs.

NFT Volume

Rumors of a Solana integration first started to swirl in January when a well-known hacker and blogger shared screenshots indicating OpenSea was exploring support for Solana-based NFTs and the network’s popular wallet, Phantom.

According to DappRadar, two marketplaces represent 98% of Solana NFT volume, with Magic Eden representing $5.3M and Solanart hosting $4.7M in trade volume over the past seven days.

By contrast, OpenSea drove $558M on Ethereum and $11.3M on Polygon over the same period, suggesting the marketplace could drive a significant increase in volume for Solana NFTs. The top five collections on Klaytn drove $3M in volume on OpenSea over the past week.

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Many Solana-based NFT projects commented on the post to welcome the integration and promote their tokens.

The Solana integration is OpenSea’s latest move to provide cheap transaction fees and make NFTs more accessible to a broader market. Etherscan currently estimates that a typical OpenSea transaction would cost between $20 and $25 on the Ethereum mainnet. Solana offers sub-cent transaction fees.

While Polygon offers transaction fees of less than $1, recent network outages and platform glitches concerning Polygon-based NFTs have led to complaints from OpenSea users.

After a meteoric rise in the second half of 2021, Solana has since shed more than half of its Total Value Locked. The native token’s price has fallen 35% this year amid the broader market downturn.

CORRECTION @ 3/31 4pm ET: Updated to note that Arthur Breitman shared rather than predicted that Opensea would support Tezos NFTs.

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