Solana is breaking records in NFT trading. Can it affect the token’s price?

NFTs on the Solana blockchain had the second-highest trading volume 30 days after Ethereum. Thus, the ecosystem processed $60M in NFT sales. Ethereum processed about $400M in the same period. Solana still processed much more than ImmutableX, Cardano, Polygon, Flow, and BNB Chain. It would seem that such figures should affect the value of the main token, but for some reason, this does not happen. 

Far from #1, but…

The success of Solana was reported by Delphi Digital, an institutional research firm. 

Solana outperforms the next big NFT ecosystem, ImmutableX, by a factor of four but lags behind Ethereum by eight times. The latter number is huge, but the Solana ecosystem is growing and evolving despite recent crypto market problems. 

As for the latter, recall that many of the world’s leading exchanges recently started blocking the withdrawal of deposits made using the Solana blockchain. There is no official explanation as to why this was happening, but there is a possibility that it was due to the strong involvement of the ecosystem in the business of collapsed FTX. We reported more about this here. 

Solana is also in second place by volume of secondary sales, again behind Ethereum. The volume of secondary sales of NFTs based on SOL since the beginning of August reached about $500M. The average cost per picture was $1.5K. This is a record for Solana, but it is still a long way from Ethereum, whose secondary sales were over $2.2B. 

It all goes down to the fact that the price of the primary token should be going up, but it’s not. Let’s talk about the value of SOL in more detail. 

Solana’s current price and predictions

At the time of writing, Solana is trading at $11.88, down 0,19% in the last hour, 2,06% on the last day, and 11,55% for the week. Market capitalization is also down, at $4.358B (-2.01 per day).

Solana’s success is also hurt by the fact that the NFT market has been falling all year. In October, sales volumes didn’t even exceed $500M. Such low figures were last seen in July 2021. 

All indications are that the market is still in bad shape due to the ongoing crypto winter, as well as the recent FTX collapse. So, according to experts, Solana is in a steady downtrend, and its values are certainly far from the peak of $258.78 recorded in July 2021.

It seems that it is the fault of the not recovered market, but there is one more probable reason.  

A lack of developers?

Solana, which, remember, was affiliated with FTX, suffered the most from the collapse of the exchange. It had a powerful impact on all indicators, so much so that the asset dropped out of the top 10, losing even to the Shiba Inu meme coin. 

However, as it turns out, it’s not just investors who are fleeing because of the decline of the ecosystem. Developers are also an important component of the ecosystem. Without their support, the project will simply die. And probably, for Solana this scenario is possible. For example, according to u.today with reference to Terminal Token, the number of active blockchain developers will decrease by more than 90% in 2022. 

But this data may not be accurate: the community has found an error in the report. It turns out that the analysis only took into account direct individual contributions to Solana’s central repositories. That is, there is no mention of other software not associated with the token. In this regard, one should not take this information literally nor deny it completely because developer outflow is still evident. 

This is sad, considering that Solana has long been considered one of the fastest-growing altcoins. If things continue at this rate, the token will quickly lose the title of the Ethereum killer