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Solana NFT Ecosystem Shines But DeFi Remains Muted: Report

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Solana’s NFT ecosystem continued to show resilience amidst a bear market. Data from Messari noted that the total number of daily new NFTs users grew by more than 8 million, over a 19% increase on a QoQ basis.

“For perspective, this growth in the third quarter followed after increasing by 46.4% in Q2 and is ~8.5x the level minted a year ago”, the tweet read.

The report attributed Solana’s NFT rise to fundamentals like a foundational user base, network stability, and improved transaction activity that drove the network value during Q3.

Sol’s position in the NFT sector remained the second largest by secondary sales volume, behind Ethereum, and narrowed the gap. Strategies to boost GameFi are underway, and unique use cases like Helium are coming to the Solana network. Efforts to improve decentralization through greater geographic, hosting, and ownership distribution continue.

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Solana NFT Ecosystem Shines But DeFi Remains Muted: Report 2

The report also highlighted the continued optimization of Metaplex’s Digital Asset Standard which it claimed played a key role in bolstering the network’s NFT ecosystem.

As reported by TronWeekly, the NFT marketplace recently announced cutting back its workforce due to the ripple effects of the FTX shockwaves.

In Q2, SOL suffered numerous network downtimes and gas fee woes during periods of congestion. To overcome these issues, core developers have rolled out QUIC and a novel fee prioritization model. 

“The solutions were clearly working by the end of Q2 as degraded network performance stabilized,” the report claimed. These along with Solana Pay and Solana mobile has expanded the ecosystem, it added.

That said, the report took note of the network’s subdued performance in the DeFi sector.

Solana’s Q3 Total Value Locked [TVL] decreased by about 16% both in USD and SOL QoQ terms. But according to the data platform, a healthy distribution of TVL across applications still exists.

“Currently, 50% of TVL is locked across most of the long-tail DeFi protocols on the network. The continued level of diversified TVL helps mitigate overall ecosystem risk.” 

Solana Roadmap: New Updates On the Horizon

As per GitHub, the latest mainnet version of the SOL network is v1. 10.29, which sought to fix various bugs along with Neon and Nitro.

While Neon Labs’s goal is to bring both scalability and low transaction costs, Nitro, on the other hand, is a Solana Virtual Machine [SVM]-compatible blockchain that will serve as a bridge between Solana and Cosmos. 



Solana’s Price Might Rebound Despite Short Selling; Here’s Why

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Solana rallied by over 13% [at press time] in the last 24 hours as investors continue to short the asset in significant numbers. But based on its overall performance, the token’s value remained in a downtrend.

A report by data analytical platform Santiment noted that SOL’s price dropped over 60% in a fortnight amidst massive shorting on Binance and perpetual trading platform DyDx.

In trading, Shorting signifies the act of selling the cryptocurrency in the hope that it falls in value making it easier to buy back at a lower price. Traders can then profit from the difference in market price.

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Solana's Price Might Rebound Despite Short Selling; Here's Why 4

The above information suggests that despite Solana’s price returning to 9% in the last 15 hours, the majority of investors are still banking on the asset’s price to fall further.

Ideally, in such scenarios, prices tend to decline but according to Santiment the ongoing FUD in the aftermath of the FTX collapse might see more price rebound.

There are not a lot of big Solana believers, even as its price bottomed out at $11.02 and rebounded to $12.70 over the past 15 hours. This FUD could cause more rebounding until traders slow down their nearly unanimous bets against SOL‘s price.

Recently, CoinShares, a digital asset investment management released a report revealing that investors cashed out $6 million in altcoins last week. These assets were mostly Solana, XRP, Binance, and Polygon “likely being a direct result of the ongoing fallout from the FTX collapse.”

Once known as the “Ethereum Killer,” SOL started trading in 2022 at $178, with a market value of $55 billion in January 2022.

Solana is Down By Over 90% In A Year

But then came “crypto winter” and the bankruptcy of cryptocurrency exchange FTX which nearly annihilated SOL price which is currently down by almost 93% over the year, trading at $13 with a $5.2 billion market value.

The demise of FTX marked the onset of the most recent decline in Solana. The blockchain Foundation’s exposure to the failing exchange came to light on November 14, days after FTX filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.

“This is less than 1% of SOL Foundation’s cash or cash equivalents and as such, the impact on Solana Foundation operations is negligible,” the Solana Foundation asserted in a post.

However, according to Forbes and the Financial Times, FTX held $982 million worth of SOL on November 10 at the time of its collapse.

Solana NFT Platform Says FTX Crash Force It To Adopt “Conservative Approach”

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Solana NFT marketplace Metaplex took to Twitter to announce trimming its working force to ensure the long-term sustainability of the protocol.

Although they were not directly affected by the collapse of FTX, the marketplace stated the resultant indirect impact on the market has forced the firm to take a “conservative approach moving forward”.

Founded in 2021, Metaplex is a Solana-based protocol that aims to be the de facto NFT tool on the blockchain. It also recently launched its own governance token, MPLX which however did not perform well in the ongoing bear market.

Due to the FTX insolvency, the total crypto market cap tanked over 20% in a span of just four days. While prices of nonfungible tokens [NFTs] on Ethereum fell 14% over the same period, Solana NFTs suffered more blows.

For instance, SolanaFloor revealed that their aggregate floor value dropped 68% from $424 million to $135 million over the last few days.

Similarly, the floor price of another SOL-powered platform DeGods plummeted by a staggering 66% to $2,700. Solana Monkey Business and y00ts too registered a drop of 68% and 70% respectively in the same time period.

One of the reasons for the poor performance of its NFT collection is attributed to FTX’s advocacy of the Solana layer-one blockchain.

During the exchange’s implosion, the price of the SOL token tanked 68% to $12. FTX’s fungible exchange token known as FTT and FTX’s SOL-based decentralized exchange [DEX] Serum was down 89% and 53%, individually, in recent days.

Investors Might Hold Off On Buying Solana-Based NFTs

It is interesting to note that FTX and Alameda Research have been closely linked to the Solana blockchain since the protocol’s inception in 2020. Both entities have been instrumental in boosting the network’s traction and visibility.

Moreover, SOL is also Alameda’s second-largest holding token, representing about 10% of the crypto’s market cap.

Due to the prevailing uncertainty on Solana-based projects, investors might look for other leading layer-one protocols to put their long-term bets. The market has currently entered a new risk-off phase, and it might take some time before confidence returns.

Additionally, NFTs being riskier assets has a much greater impact on the returns [profits/losses]. Hence, risk-averse investors might wish to hold off on buying NFTs until the issue is fixed.

Solana’s DeFi Ecosystem Bearing Brunt Of The FTX Contagion

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Solana’s Total Value Locked has shrunk in the backdrop of FTX contagion. TVL is a metric that highlights the total coins deposited across DeFi protocols, including staking, lending, and liquidity pools. 

Data from DeFiLlama showed that SOL’s TVL tanked over 33% at the time of writing, to $417 million, a significant decline from the previous peak of $10 billion reached on November 9, 2021.

Of all the SOL’s protocols, DeFi platform Solend has lost nearly its entire worth. Its current TVL stands at $44.83 million, down by over 60% in the last 24 hours. Similarly, Radium and Lido’s TVL have too fallen by 35% and 47% over the day and are currently hovering at $62 million and $49 million respectively.

The largest among them, Liquid staking protocol Marinade Finance, too witnessed its TVL on the chain, fall to 37% to rest at $107 million in the past 24 hours.

The other day Solana’s native SOL coin lose its value in the early hours of 9 Nov, leaving lending firm Solend to close out a sizable account that went underwater. SOL’s price depreciated by 65% in less than a week and is trading at $14 at press time.

At first, Solend attributed the failure to liquidate to network slack. Later investigation revealed that the problem was a lack of on-chain SOL liquidity, which the protocol has attempted to address by raising the interest rate on SOL to over 2,500% in an effort to attract deposits and motivate borrowers to repay their loans.

Panic Among Solana Investors Amidst FTX FUD

As investors hurried to sell their stakes, more than $800 million worth of SOL is expected to be unstaked early on Wednesday, data from solanacompass.com revealed.

SOL started to decline shortly after Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao declared that the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world would sell $500 million in FTT, a token created by a rival FTX, as a result of recent “revelations,”

FTT holders rushed to exit their positions by selling the token aggressively out of concern that the Binance sale would cause its price to soar, leading to the exact freefall they had anticipated.

As Solana began its descent, leading on-chain experts speculated that FTX and Alameda were liquidating their SOL holdings to raise cash to support FTT.

The CoinDesk article stated that as of June 30, Alameda held around $1 billion in SOL. 10% of Solana’s market capitalization at the time was represented by it.

Solana Blockchain Migration Proposal Presented By Helium Devs

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A migration proposal to the Solana blockchain is being presented by the core developers of the crypto-powered wireless network Helium. The HIP 70 proposal, is intended to improve the operational efficiency of the Helium blockchain significantly.

“To achieve this goal, the core developer team proposes moving Proof-of-Coverage (“PoC”) and Data Transfer Accounting to Oracles, which simplifies the system architecture and allows for the selection of a more scalable Layer 1 (“L1”) — specifically, Solana”, the blog read.

Helium is a decentralized blockchain project aimed at facilitating anyone to own and operate a wireless network for low-power Internet of Things (IoT) devices fueled by blockchain.

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Solana Blockchain Migration Proposal Presented By Helium Devs 6

Further, the blog explained how the proposed change to the Solana network would affect the entire ecosystem, from users to builders to manufacturers.

Arman Dezfuli-Arjomandi, a computer programmer in Philadelphia who hosts a podcast about Helium tweeted that it will allow the network to fix the scaling woes that impact user experience the most: Inconsistent PoC and data transfer.

“Validators will have 2 weeks to unstake once the chain transition happens (likely months away). If they don’t, their HNT will become veHNT w/ 6mo lockup,” he said in the thread.

“Moving to Solana Would Bring Significant Economies Of Scale”

Adding that such a move would bring significant economies of scale through the vast range of composable Solana developer tools, features, and applications.

Recently Nova labs, the development firm behind Helium, has expressed interest in the crucial, parallel realm of cellular networks.

And as part of Helium’s expansion into mobile communications, Nova said it acquired FreedomFi, a software entity for crowdsourced 5G networks.

Nova CEO Amir Haleem stated, “We had a desire to have more expertise in-house from FreedomFi and to be closer to accelerating what we are doing in 5G cellular.”

FreedomFi team members are set to join Nova Labs as part of the acquisition. It secured $9.5 million from semiconductor firm Qualcomm and electronics corporation Samsung in March, next year.

Apart from that, Helium is also planning to announce its upcoming project’s “HeliumHouse” event on Sept. 20 in New York, raising investors’ interest.

At this event, it’s expected that the crypto-driven wireless network would provide community demos and other updates about the project’s roadmap and growth prospects. 

Solana Attack: Slope Is to Blame; Sam Bankman Extends Support

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Following yesterday’s attack on the Solana ecosystem, information is now emerging suggesting wallet provider Slope is primarily to blame for the security flaw that allowed thousands of Solana customers to have their cryptocurrency stolen.

Slope is a layer-1 (L1) Web3 wallet service for the Solana blockchain. The foundation blamed Slope, claiming that “it appears impacted addresses were at one point created, imported, or used in Slope mobile wallet applications” through the Solana Status Twitter account on Wednesday.

Anatoly Yakovenko, a co-founder of Solana, also connected Slope wallets to the attack on his own Twitter account.

He advised customers to acquire a seed phrase from a provider other than Slope as early as they could. Additionally, he advised one of the impacted users to “Start practicing the cold/hot wallet distinction.”

Slope said that “A cohort of Slope wallets were compromised in the attack,” including some belonging to its own workers, in a statement on Wednesday regarding the status of its continuing investigation into the matter.

Users of Slope wallets were asked by the team to create new, unique seed phrases and move all assets to them rather than leaving any money in older wallets that could still be vulnerable in the future.

The Phantom team increased the caution by encouraging users to switch to a new non-Slope wallet and move their funds elsewhere.

Sam Bankman backs Solana

A day after the platform was subjected to a significant exploit, Sam Bankman-Fried, the CEO of FTX, came out in favor of the SOL coin. SOL is now the most underrated cryptocurrency, according to SBF, who said as much in a recent interview with Fortune magazine.

“Any blockchain would’ve broken if it’d tried to do what SOL had done. This was a way for it to figure out what needed to be refined. Pushing the boundaries to see what breaks is what other blockchains “should be doing”.

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Solana Attack: Slope Is to Blame; Sam Bankman Extends Support 8

He said that despite all the negative publicity, Solana has effectively resolved two-thirds of its technical problems. He continued by saying that he is convinced it will pass the last third.

Solana’s SOL accused of being an unregistered security

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Looks like XRP has some competition since Solana’s SOL was also just charged with being an unregistered security. The crypto-verse is full of surprising twists and turns. The market has seen everything, from lawsuits to outright allegations. Speaking of lawsuits, the SEC vs. Ripple case is still pending, and XRP is still referred to as an “unregistered security.”

Solana filed for unregistered securities sale

Recently, SOL investor Mark Young filed a lawsuit in a federal court in California. Young accuses the network’s creator and management of illegally profiting from SOL in the class-action lawsuit. He continued by saying that SOL was a very centralized cryptocurrency. As a result, this feature has increased profits for the asset’s creators while decreasing investor portfolios.

The filing further stated,

“Purchasers who bought SOL securities have invested money or given valuable services to a common enterprise, Solana. These purchasers have a reasonable expectation of profit based upon the efforts of the promoters, Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation, to build a blockchain network that will rival Bitcoin and Ethereum and become the accepted framework for transactions on the blockchain.”

Solana Labs, Solana Foundation, CEO Anatoly Yakovenko, Multicoin Capital Management, Kyle Samani, Managing Partner at Multicoin, and trading platform FalconX were all named as defendants in the action.

Roche Freedman LLP is also in charge of the lawsuit. In litigation against Binance.US, the same firm has been defending investors.

Solana’s outages found in the lawsuit

Throughout the year, the SOL network experienced roughly 12 outages. The network was down as a result for several hours. Young based his claim that the network’s disruptions demonstrate its high degree of centralization on the same idea.

In addition, Young pointed out that there were numerous SOL token sales prior to the asset’s public sale. Millions of dollars’ worth of SOL were offloaded, and Multicoin and FalconX were involved.

None of the defendants have made any public pronouncements or expressed their agreement with the action. Investors in Solana, though, remain patient as they watch the case develop.

In addition, SOL was up 2.8% and trading at $37.70 at press time, unaffected by the case.

Chainlink Deploys 7 Price Feeds For Solana Developers

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Blockchain oracle pioneer Chainlink Price Feeds has announced integrations on the Solana Mainnet for decentralized finance [DeFi] applications. In accordance with the press release, the latest deployment will help developers building on Solana to leverage seven different Chainlink Price Feeds that include BTC, ETH, USDC, and others.

Chainlink claims to offer high-quality near real-time price updates, enabling them to build a new realm of hybrid smart contract applications that provide superior performance around trade execution and risk management.

Anatoly Yakovenko, co-founder of Solana said, the launch on Solana will grant DeFi developers access to the most widely used oracles in the blockchain. “Solana’s high-speed blockchain can deliver high-frequency pricing data to dapps, enabling developers to build new DeFi dapps and products,” he added.

The integration with Solana is a major leap forward for the kind of scalable, institutional-grade, DeFi applications that can be built only on Solana,” Sergey Nazarov, co-founder of Chainlink.

Additionally, Chainlink also plans to launch the Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol [CCIP]. With this new feature, the platform boasts that Solana users and developers will be able to move tokens and execute smart contracts across different blockchains, enabling the creation of cross-chain applications.

In the next few months, hundreds of additional Chainlink Price Feeds, as well as other Chainlink oracle services, will be made available to Solana developers during the next stages of the integration, the blog post read.

That said, Solana which was once considered a rising star of the cryptoverse has grabbed the limelight for the wrong reasons. The network’s latest string of outages has cast serious doubts on its reliability.

Chainlink’s latest addition comes amidst Solana’s network woes

At 16:55 UTC on June 1, developers claimed that the outage was due to a bug in the blockchain’s consensus mechanism. They then asked validators to upgrade their client versions as the bug fix was released and even published instructions on executing the restart procedure.

The mainnet was eventually restarted at 21:00 UTC.

Immediately after the incident, Alchemy, the Web3 development platform, and infrastructure provider announced its support for the blockchain. This goes to show that the controversial blockchain continues to be a preferred choice for building Web3 applications.

Jill Gunter weighs in on the battle between old blockchains and new protocols

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Leading crypto investor Jill Gunter has shared her view on the fierce competition between multiple established blockchains and the arrival of several new protocols.

Gunter’s exposure to crypto began in 2011 during her stint at Goldman Sachs as a derivatives trader. Then she started research on blockchain protocols and worked as a VC at Slow Ventures before co-founding Espresso Systems.

In a recent podcast, Gunter spoke about the three distinct phases of development within the crypto industry that have led it to this moment of heated competition.

The first phase according to Gunter is the era of altcoins. This period was marked by the entry of protocols like Litecoin, Dogecoin, and ZCash, when developers sought to make improvements to the Bitcoin protocol such as changing the block size to increase the throughput of the system, she explained.

“What you came out with was a lot of blockchains and a lot of tokens that had a lot of the same properties as Bitcoin, but changed the feature set,” Gunter said.

The next phase, the entrepreneur claims came with the creation of Ethereum in 2015.

Finally, the modern era of layer-one blockchains began as developers tried to tweak the feature sets of programmable blockchains to address some of the issues with Ethereum that exist today, she said

“Alternative blockchains have not been fully put to the test like Ethereum”-Jill Gunter

Pointing to Ethereum’s high transaction and gas fees as bottlenecks that have left users frustrated. the co-founder then cited the recent Yuga Labs’ metaverse land sale fiasco when people trying to buy NFTs were faced with exorbitant gas fees and failed transactions because of the popularity of the drop.

While alternative blockchains such as Solana and Avalanche offer lower costs and can process transactions much faster than Ethereum, Gunter said these other chains have not been “fully put to the test that Ethereum has been” because they haven’t had to process as many users at once.

What’s more, these newer chains have all “centralized something in some way,” Gunter stated.

Adding that all the layer-one projects out there are “making the right noises,” but have yet to be put to the test by users.

Binance postponed ApeCoin and Solana transactions

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Owing to excessive demand, Binance has temporarily put on hold the ApeCoin [APE] lending function. The amount left on the exchange is currently insufficient to satisfy the need for APE by its users. Additionally, withdrawals on the Solana [SOL] network have been suspended a few times since April 25.

In the notice published on its website, the leading crypto exchange cited high withdrawal volume generated with blank transaction IDs that led to the suspension of SOL. The blog read,

“We are actively working with the project team to provide a stable, long-term solution to reduce transaction failure and enhance the user experience. A further announcement will be posted if there are updates on this.”

Speaking about ApeCoin, the token is the heart of the Otherside Metaverse of the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT project and is hitting a wave of milestones after its launch.

Besides being labeled as the hottest cryptocurrency in 2022, the popular coin has reached a market cap of over 5 billion dollars. Since its entry into the market in early 2022, ApeCoin has risen to a whopping 1000%. and is now the third-highest liquidated coin after Bitcoin and Ethereum, according to Coinglass.com.

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The 24-hour trade volume of APE shows the asset occupying the fourth position after Tether, Bitcoin, and Ethereum and could very well be on a path toward exceeding its all-time high of $39.40.

This value could be matched or eclipsed once the asset starts being utilized in the Otherside Metaverse ecosystem beginning tomorrow.

Apecoin- the rising star in the metaverse universe

ApeCoin, the default currency required in Otherside has become the biggest metaverse token by market capitalization and has managed to surpass bigger rivals like Decentraland’s MANA, The Sandbox’s SAND, and Axie Infinity’s AXS.

At the time of publication, ApeCoin is exchanging hands at $23.12 and up by almost 4% in the past 24 hours. One of the main reasons behind APE’s meteoric rise is the frenzy surrounding the sale this weekend.

Around 50,000 plots of virtual land are open for public sale on Otherside, a soon-to-be-released metaverse platform. Interested buyers will need ApeCoin to purchase a plot, which is contributing to the price surge.