Solana Surges as NFT Trading Rises 80% Following OpenSea Reveal

It’s been a relatively calm day for the cryptocurrency market, with the wider market up less than 2% over the past 24 hours. But in the top 10 coins by market cap, Solana is rising well above the rest right now.

Solana (SOL) jumped by nearly 12% today, according to data from CoinMarketCap, pushing its price to over $124. That’s a 36% increase from just one week ago, and the highest that Solana has been since January 21. Trading has since cooled, and SOL is currently trading for around $120, a 6% increase over the last 24 hours and a 28% rise over the last seven days.

Elsewhere in the top 10, Avalanche (AVAX) is up 7% to $99, while Binance Coin (BNB) has jumped nearly 4% to $448. Everything else in the upper echelon of coins has seen less of a leap over the past 24 hours.

Why is Solana pumping so hard today? It could be due to rising demand for NFTs on the platform, spurred in large part by yesterday’s news that leading NFT marketplace OpenSea will implement Solana NFTs come April.

The news had been awaited for months, since first leaks appeared in January that showed Solana-related development work on the Ethereum-centric marketplace. Recent leaks have piled up even more, and Solana finally dropped an official teaser video yesterday.

As a result, NFT trading volume has soared over the past day on other existing Solana marketplaces, such as Magic Eden. According to CryptoSlam, Solana NFT trading volume is up more than 80% over the past 24 hours compared to the previous 24-hour span.

Ethereum trading volume only registered an 8% bump over the last 24 hours, by comparison. However, it’s worth noting that Ethereum generates significantly more trading overall, with over $67 million worth in volume over the past day versus $13 million on Solana.

Still, that $13 million figure is very significant in the younger Solana space: CryptoSlam shows about $147 million worth of Solana trading over the past 30 days, so the past day’s sum is a significant uptick over the recent daily average. Top profile picture collection Solana Monkey Business is reaping the largest share of increased interest, with more than $2 million in volume over the past 24 hours.

The incoming addition of Solana NFTs to OpenSea could expose the market to a much larger audience, and Twitter chatter suggests that existing Solana collectors and NFT buyers from elsewhere in the ecosystem are keen on the news.

Some Ethereum whales are pouring funds into the Solana NFT market now, including one Ethereum NFT collector who said that he was investing $180,000 worth of SOL to “sweep” various project floors, or buy up the cheapest available NFTs for some Solana NFT collections.

Elsewhere in the market, the largest climber in the top 100 coins by market cap this week is Zilliqa (ZIL), a coin that hasn’t made waves in quite some time.

Following the announcement of the impending launch of the Zilliqa-based metaverse app, Metapolis, the coin has surged 277% over the past week—including nearly 70% over the past day alone. ZIL is now priced above $0.17 per coin, the highest since the market-wide crypto crash of May 2021.

Another big winner this week is STEPN (GMT), a play-to-earn game based on waking and running outdoors. The movement-based app’s token has popped 148% this week, and is up 33% on the day. STEPN is built on Solana, too, so SOL’s own rise this week could be benefitting GMT too—or vice versa.