With this announcement, Solana becomes the fourth blockchain to be supported by OpenSea.
NFT marketplace OpenSea has announced its plan to begin supporting Solana NFTs in April. Asides from racking up billions of dollars in trading volume monthly, the announcement is the latest move by the marketplace to increase its market dominance. Earlier this year, it raised $300 million to achieve a market valuation of $13 billion. Later in February, the marketplace launched a venture program to support NFT startups and projects.
Now, it’s revealed an intended integration with the Solana chain. The $13 billion firm revealed this via a video promo uploaded on its Twitter platform. The video tagged ‘wen Solana’ featured several Solana NFTs including Solana Monkey Business and Aurory. Boryoku Dragonz, Catalina Whale Mixer, and Degenerate Ape Academy were also featured. OpenSea called it ‘the best kept secret in web3’.
Prior to the announcement, popular tech blogger, Jane Manchun Wong noticed signs of a coming integration after discovering mentions of Solana and Phantom wallet on the site in January. Most recently, she also discovered signs a Solana launch was imminent. Others also noted they could now connect Phantom wallets to OpenSea though Solana NFTs were not yet available on the marketplace.
The Solana NFTs Ecosystem
The Solana NFTs Ecosystem is an interesting one. The NFTs collection grew rapidly with the rise of Solana Monkey Business, Degenerate Ape Academy, and Aurory among others. After Ethereum, Solana has the biggest NFT ecosystem with a market capitalization of $1.5 billion. It also boasts the second-highest all-time NFT sales.
However, Solana users could only trade their Solana NFTs on other marketplaces like Magic Eden, Solanart and SolSea. Of these, Magic Eden tops the list with about 90% of the market share in the past week alone according to Dune Analytics.
With this announcement, Solana becomes the fourth blockchain to be supported by OpenSea. There were previous integrations with Ethereum, Klatyn, and Polygon.
Being able to trade their NFTs on OpenSea will present traders with sale options. However, how this will affect the market dominance of Magic Eden remains to be seen. One thing that may help Magic Eden is its 2% transaction fee which is 50 basis points below that of OpenSea.
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