Solana NFTs Now Heading to Rarible Following OpenSea Debut

The Solana NFT ecosystem is expanding to new frontiers this month. After launching last week on OpenSea, the most popular marketplace in the wider NFT space, now rival Rarible has announced that its planned integration of Solana NFTs is now live.

Today, the open source and increasingly multi-chain Rarible Protocol confirmed that it has added support for NFTs minted on the Solana blockchain, and that Solana NFTs will begin appearing on the Rarible.com marketplace “in the coming weeks,” according to a release.

Because Rarible is a protocol rather than solely a marketplace, it can be tapped by other projects and creators to develop their own custom platforms. Solana joins a growing list of supported blockchains, including Ethereum, Flow, Tezos, and the recently-added Polygon. Rarible’s RARI token is used for governance across the multi-chain ecosystem.

Alongside today’s announcement of Solana support, Rarible Protocol has announced the creation of a custom marketplace for the popular Solana NFT project Degenerate Ape Academy (DAA).

The platform, which uses Rarible Protocol’s white-label marketplace tech, will support DAA and its related NFT projects, including Degenerate Trash Pandas and Degenerate Ape Kindergarten. Through the custom marketplace, a percentage of sales will automatically go to the Degen DAOO, or decentralized autonomous organization… organization.

Rarible’s addition of Solana support isn’t a surprise—CEO and co-founder Alexei Falin told Decrypt in late November that the blockchain was on the protocol’s roadmap, and that it was developing the integration internally. At the time, Tezos support was about to launch, and Polygon support (which ultimately launched in March) was similarly on the horizon.

NFTs work like blockchain-backed receipts for digital items, including artwork, profile pictures, collectibles, and more. The NFT market generated some $25 billion in trading volume last year, with Ethereum and its sidechain and layer-2 scaling solutions leading the pack by far.

Solana is the second-largest NFT ecosystem, and it rapidly gained steam in the second half of last year on the back of projects like Degenerate Ape Academy, Solana Monkey Business, and Aurory. Other notable projects of late include DeGods and metaverse platform Portals, and Magic Eden is currently the largest marketplace in the Solana NFT space.

Solana’s addition to OpenSea was widely expected to be a significant boon to the NFT ecosystem, which is still much smaller than that of Ethereum.

However, the short-term impact has apparently been minimal: CryptoSlam reported that Solana NFT trading on the whole was down 12% week over week, as of late Wednesday. Meanwhile, stats from Magic Eden suggest that OpenSea has processed just 13,082 SOL (about $1.37 million) worth of Solana NFT transactions over the past week.