ON–167: Solana ☀️
Apr 28, 2023
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Solana continues to see the high daily transaction volume across comparable blockchain platforms and has recently seen daily active addresses increase in the latter half of April. The network currently boasts 7D average daily transactions of ~24M and daily active address 7D average of ~288K (up 19% WoW). While Solana has seen recent daily active user growth, usage is still down from YTD highs of ~650K daily active users in January.
Solana's current TVL of ~$275M has remained somewhat consistent over the past few months (up 10% over last 90 days), but its nominal value lags behind comparable blockchain networks including FTM (~$424M TVL), Arbitrum (~$2.2B TVL), Optimism (~$920M TVL) and Avalanche (~$794M TVL).
However, Solana's stablecoin market cap of ~$1.5B only lags behind that of Arbitrum (~$1.9B) and Polygon (~$1.5B) and is higher than Optimism (~$668M), Fantom (~$397M) and Avalanche (~$1.4B). Stablecoin volumes can indicate near-term investor interest to transact on a given platform.
👥 LTirrell
- The Mad Lads collection, from the team who created the Backpack wallet and new technology for executable NFTs (xNFTs), launched on April 21st. Since then NFT volume on Solana has doubled, from about $2 million (90,000 SOL) in the days before to about $4 million (200,000 SOL) per day. Mad Lads alone accounted for nearly $10 million in the first 24 hours after launch.
- Over half of Solana NFT sales volume is from Mad Lads since its launch ($18M; ~830K SOL). With an enforced fee of 5%, the team generated nearly $1 million in revenue, on top of $1.5M from the initial mint. During this time, Tensor overtook Magic Eden as the top marketplace by volume.
- Traits play a key factor in Mad Lad price, while also creating sub-communities of holders. Female NFTs make up 10% of the collection and sell for nearly twice as much as Males. Skull NFTs are especially valuable, selling for higher than their rarity suggests. The top Skull sold for 3,420.69 SOL.
- 🔬: The Mad King 1 of 1 NFT was sold for 50 SOL before the art was revealed. The lucky collector was able to obtain the rarest Mad Lad by placing an early bid on the Tensor marketplace.
- Magic Eden is an NFT marketplace on Solana. Zooming out, Solana NFT volume has remained relatively consistent over the past 3 months, tracking ~$20-25M weekly. Over the past months, certain days have seen elevated trading activity, largely due to interest in new Sol NFT collections like Mad Lads. While volumes are down from ~200-300K SOL early January levels, likely due to a decline in overall NFT activity, volumes in USD are down to a lesser extent.
- Magic Eden’s DAU on Solana are tracking ~6-8K, down slightly from early January levels. User levels have remained relatively steady over the past three months. That being said, users are still transacting 3-4x per day, showing trading activity on a user basis is relatively similar to prior levels.
- Magic Eden recently launched on Polygon. After a quieter start, Magic Eden has recently seen user growth, where daily buyers and sellers were up ~5-10x some days from early March levels. Notably, the majority of volume for Magic Eden on Polygon is Y00ts, a former Solana collection.
👥 Ben Chow
As the liquidity aggregator for Solana, Jupiter recently surpassed a major milestone of $30B in trade volume from 736k wallets, processing more than $3B in volume and adding 95k new wallets in the last 3 months with new users trending upwards in April.
Developer demand for Jupiter is steadily increasing, achieving 24,630 downloads in March 2023 compared to 11,339 in March 2022. Even with growing API usage, Jupiter SDK has achieved a total of 272,034 downloads till date, signaling the protocol's growing popularity and usefulness to the ecosystem.
Jupiter is a main revenue for both integration and DEX partners. Phantom, the largest wallet on Solana has generated over $7.6M in fee revenue. And Jupiter was responsible for 64% or $106k of the $164k of weekly fee revenue generated by Orca, one of the DEXes on Solana.