Solana NFTs Can Now Be Traded on OpenSea

By Andrew Hayward

Following last week’s official teaser that support was coming, NFTs minted on the Solana blockchain network are now available to trade on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace by volume.

OpenSea is primarily based around Ethereum and currently dominates the NFT trading space by a large margin. With the addition of Solana, OpenSea now accommodates collectibles from the second-largest NFT ecosystem outside of Ethereum and its sidechain/layer-2 scaling solutions.

According to the marketplace, Solana support has been added in beta with “limited collection coverage.” OpenSea says that it currently supports 165 collections, although if you search the marketplace by chain, it shows more than 865,000 total NFTs minted on Solana.

Popular Solana NFT collections like Solana Monkey Business, DeGods, Degenerate Ape Academy, Aurory, and Shadowy Super Coder are currently listed on OpenSea. Solana offers significantly lower transaction fees than Ethereum, and is a more energy-efficient blockchain network that can handle larger numbers of transactions at a time.

Solana’s arrival on OpenSea was long anticipated. Leaked imagery began popping up in January and continued until last week’s official tease, as users spotted apparent Solana wallet integrations being added to the marketplace.

Earlier today, Solana NFTs were live on OpenSea ahead of the official announcement, but then were missing for several hours. The absence coincided with Solana network issues, leading many on social media to speculate that OpenSea had pulled back the launch as a result of the network congestion. However, OpenSea did not say anything officially to that effect.

In OpenSea’s Discord server earlier, members of the marketplace’s community team responded to user complaints of issues buying Solana NFTs. One representative wrote that “the whole company is on this right now,” apparently referring to getting Solana NFT functionality running as expected.

Anatoly Yakavenko, co-founder of Solana Labs, responded to complaints about Solana’s network performance on Twitter. In one tweet, he wrote that “Performance sucks under load.  Fixing it is the highest priority,” and elsewhere wrote in defense of public criticism, tweeting, “Shame helps. A fire under your ass keeps you focused.”

As the leading NFT marketplace, OpenSea now regularly handles billions of dollars’ worth of trading volume each month. Magic Eden is currently the largest NFT marketplace on Solana and generates volume in the hundreds of millions each month. Magic Eden confirmed to Decrypt this week that it will embrace its “Solana-native” status and let customers spend tokens from projects like Aurory and DeGods to purchase NFTs.

Interestingly, OpenSea differs from other Solana marketplaces by letting users keep listed NFTs within their own wallet. Targeting rivals like Magic Eden and FTX NFTs, OpenSea wrote, “On OpenSea, you don't have to choose between liquidity and control—when you list, your NFTs stay in your wallet until they're sold.”

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