Four Blockchains Making an Impact on the NFT Market – NFTgators
Quick take:
- Leading NFT marketplace OpenSea rose to fame while powered by Ethereum before integrating multiple blockchains.
- Polygon powers Reddit’s collectible avatars and NFT marketplace as well as Instagram’s upcoming NFT toolkit.
- Solana has the second largest share of the NFT market while Ripple brings more creators to the XRP Ledger.
Before the market downturn that has affected the NFT space in recent months, the market peaked in January with a global total sales volume of $4.7 billion according to CryptoSlam.
Bearish sentiment aside, there is no doubt that some blockchains are still having a massive impact on the NFT space, namely Ethereum, Polygon, Ripple and Solana. These four networks have dominated the NFT news headlines this year for different reasons.
Launched in 2017, the leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea, rose to fame while powered by Ethereum. Last September, the marketplace announced that it would expand to other blockchains beyond its main network, Ethereum, as well as Polygon and Klaytn the only other integrated networks at the time.
The symbiotic relationship between Ethereum and Polygon
As the NFT market’s blockchain of choice, Ethereum’s impact cannot be ignored as some of the top NFT marketplaces, including Rarible, SuperRare, Foundation and LooksRare, were first developed on the Ethereum blockchain, just like OpenSea. With a majority of NFTs minted on Ethereum, the network still dominates the NFT market share.
Before Ethereum’s recent transition from a Proof-of-Work to a Proof-of-Stake system, which drastically reduced its carbon footprint by ~99.95%, Layer-2 networks have emerged to reduce the costly gas fees and speed up transactions on the blockchain. users sometimes faced congested network and exorbitant fees for minting NFTs. As the name suggests, Layer-2 networks are built on top of Ethereum, which is a Layer-1 network, which ultimately still relies on Ethereum to function.
Speaking of Layer-2 networks, Polygon has emerged as one of the largest sidechain scaling solutions, not created as an “Ethereum killer”, but rather to help Ethereum expand in efficiency, security, size and utility . NFT marketplaces distributed on the Polygon network include OpenSea, Refinable, tofuNFT and NFTrade, to name a few. It has also entered into a high-profile partnership with Starbucks for an NFT loyalty program called “Starbucks Odyssey” that will bring its customers to Web3.
Also, Reddit’s successful collectible avatars, which recently passed $10 million in sales volume in three months, are polygon-based. Today, Meta announced that it will soon allow creators to create and sell NFTs in-app using the social networking platform’s end-to-end toolset powered by Polygon, potentially onboarding Instagram’s one billion active monthly users to Web3.
Solana & Ripple move past their controversial reputation
In terms of blockchains competing with Ethereum, Solana has gained ground in the past couple of months as it recorded higher daily trading volumes than Ethereum in September, according to Delphi Digital. It currently has the second largest share of the NFT market as NFT sales on Solana exceeded $1 billion in January.
Despite its reputation for interruption and network stop, Solana operates multiple NFT marketplaces including the largest marketplace by volume on the network, Magic Eden, as well as SolSea, Fractal, Exchange.Art, Solanart, OpenSea and more. Some of
Commenting on Solana’s success, Alex Fleseriu, CEO of Exchange.Art, said: “Solana really stands out from other blockchains thanks to the community it has built. It has one of the fastest developer ecosystems and there has been an onslaught of artists joining the Solana NFT community.”
Echoing Fleserius’ sentiment, Rahul Sood, CEO and co-founder of Irreverent Labs, added: “Solana built the entire brand around gaming NFTs, and the creator and art community. The transaction speeds are excellent and the cost of transactions is very low unlike anything like Ethereum whose gas fees can be incredibly high. As a blockchain game developer, I can say that Solana is one of the more popular blockchains in the space.”
Although Ripple has been involved in a lawsuit with the SEC since late 2020, and is better known for serving the financial community with money transfers and payments, it is pushing forward with its NFT ambitions. It recently launched a $250 million creator fund with plans to provide creators with the technical and financial support needed to build web3 projects such as NFTs and other ecosystem tokens on the XRP Ledger, a decentralized public blockchain.
According to Ripple, NFTs on the XRP Ledger were designed with efficiency in mind. With XLS-20 (the standard for XRPL NFTs), developers can support multiple NFTs at a lower cost and do things like leverage auction functionality and an efficient storage mechanism, directly a cut of the secondary sale to the original coiner on XRPL, or even co. – own NFTs.
“Ripple appears to be the preferred future protocol for transactions due to its high speeds and low cost per transaction with minimal energy costs,” said Bob Bilbruck, CEO of Captjur, a consulting and business services firm.
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