Solana remains the fourth-largest blockchain platform, excluding USDT, which is third by market cap. Over the past year or so, SOL, the native token of the modern network, has been on a roll, even surpassing Bitcoin. This expansion comes despite Bitcoin racing to record highs.
While optimism is high, the crypto market is cooling overall and there are concerns that the next wave confirming the one from Q1 2024 could be delayed. But as crypto analysts keep an eye on politics and other factors, Solana is gaining momentum.
Solana Attracts More NFT Users Than Ethereum and Polygon
Based on recent on-chain activity, the latest data shows that Solana is the king of NFTs, especially in terms of the number of items mined. At the time of writing, Solana dominates with a market share of 35%, almost double that of Ethereum at 16%.
According to NFT pulseSolana attracted 8,400 users in the past day. Meanwhile, others choose Polygon, the Ethereum sidechain, as their favorite platform. There were 6,100 active users in the past day.
At this rate, there are about 40,000 active users on Solana in the past week, bringing the number to over 1.5 million this year so far. Interestingly enough, there are users on Ethereum in the same time frame, about 706,000 per year.
Ethereum generates the largest trading volume in USD terms
However, in terms of trading volume, Ethereum leads the way. Over the past day, nearly $4.7 million in trading volume has been generated on the premier smart contracts platform, more than 2x more on Solana at around $2.1 million. Over $7.3 billion worth of NFTs have been traded on Ethereum in the past year, more than 3x on Solana at just $2 billion.
The shift in user numbers in favor of Solana is mainly due to the low transaction fees and high scalability of the network. While Ethereum fees may be higher, gas fees have decreased in recent months.
The dropping of fees may be partly due to efforts by Ethereum developers to improve the user experience. Earlier this year, the smart contracts platform was activated Dencuna hard fork that made layer-2 transactions cheaper.
The cheaper it is to deploy smart contracts and mint NFTs, the more users there are. In the past week, Base, one of the largest Ethereum layer-2 coins by total value locked (TVL), attracted over 14,500 users.
With Solana chain activity increasing, traders are keeping an eye on whether the bulls will continue to rise and break above $190. A break above this level could see SOL rise to the highs of $210 in 2024.
Main image by dashmydesigner on DeviantArt, chart by TradingView