Solana, a popular open source Blockchain that facilitates smart contracts, has had significant market performance in recent months. Solana’s NFT sales volume led to it being the second-largest protocol at the end of the quarter, according to data from cryptocurrency analytics platform Messari, with Ethereum taking first place.
Despite the volatility seen in network usage and infrastructure at the end of the quarter, the smart contract platform welcomed new NFTs in the first quarter. The NFT market responded positively, with sales exceeding a billion dollars.
The network’s diversification of TLV across different DeFi applications, such as the enhancement of the user experience with the Phantom mobile wallet, as well as the launch of different applications within the network that were not in the DeFi space, all played a significant role in Solana’s growth.
However, there was some pushback on the network, as network failure occurred once again. The network was taken down for 8 hours on May 2nd, and was only returned online when network validators performed a cluster restart. This is one of numerous examples that have been linked to high network congestion.
Solana has experienced an increase in several measures throughout the final quarter of this year. Similarly, certain downward movements have emerged.
According to Messari, “while market cap and revenue declined by 30% and 43.5 percent, respectively, the network experienced continued uptrends in usage, as measured by average active unique fee payers (+28.4 percent), average transactions per second (+94.8 percent), and total average daily transactions (+4.2 percent).”
