The rollout comes in the wake of previous Solana network problems, most notably today.
Following last week’s official teaser, NFTs generated on the Solana blockchain network are now available for trading on OpenSea, the world’s biggest NFT marketplace by volume.
OpenSea is mostly built on Ethereum and presently controls a significant portion of the NFT trading market. OpenSea now supports collectibles from the second-largest NFT ecosystem outside of Ethereum, as well as its sidechain/layer-2 scaling options.
Solana support has been implemented in beta with “limited collection coverage,” according to the marketplace. Although OpenSea claims to support 165 collections, a check of the marketplace by chain reveals more than 865,000 total NFTs minted on Solana.
OpenSea now lists popular Solana NFT collections such as Solana Monkey Business, DeGods, Degenerate Ape Academy, Aurory, and Shadowy Super Coder. Solana has much cheaper transaction costs than Ethereum and a more energy-efficient blockchain network capable of processing a greater volume of transactions concurrently.
The debut of Solana on OpenSea was long-awaited. Users saw potential Solana wallet connections being introduced to the marketplace in January and persisted until last week’s official tease.
Earlier today, before the formal release, Solana NFTs were active on OpenSea, but then went away for some hours. The absence coincided with troubles with the Solana network, prompting many on social media to suspect that OpenSea had canceled the launch due to network congestion. However, OpenSea made no public statement to that effect.
Earlier this week, members of OpenSea’s community staff reacted to customer concerns about difficulties purchasing Solana NFTs through the marketplace’s Discord service. According to one official, “the whole firm is focused on this right now,” probably referring to ensuring that the Solana NFT feature works as intended.
Anatoly Yakavenko, the co-founder of Solana Labs, replied to Twitter’s concerns regarding the performance of Solana’s network. He said in one tweet that “Performance suffers under load.” “Fixing it is the primary objective,” and elsewhere argued in favor of public criticism, tweeting, “Shame helps.” Burning in the pit of your stomach keeps you focused.”
As the premier NFT marketplace, OpenSea today handles monthly trade volumes in the billions of dollars. Magic Eden is now the biggest NFT marketplace on Solana, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in monthly volume. Magic Eden confirmed this week to Decrypt that it would embrace its “Solana-native” status and let clients buy NFTs using tokens from projects like Aurory and DeGods.
Interestingly, OpenSea is unique among Solana markets in that it allows users to store listed NFTs inside their own wallets. OpenSea commented in response to competitors such as Magic Eden and FTX NFTs, “On OpenSea, you don’t have to choose between liquidity and control—when you list, your NFTs remain in your wallet until sold.”
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