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Solana Dominates NFT Space Despite Recent Network Downtime

Solana Dominates NFT Space Despite Recent Network Downtime

Despite recently suffering a network outage for the umpteenth time, reports show that Solana (SOL) has dominated the NFT space in the past few weeks.

In the face of the biting bearish sentiment in the cryptocurrency industry, non-fungible token (NFT) sales have remained relatively consistent over the past few months. Solana is leading the charge in the space in recent weeks, dominating other NFT blockchains in trading volume, including Ethereum (ETH), the most prominent decentralized finance (DeFi) blockchain.

Over the last six weeks, Solana’s NFT trading volume jumped from 7% to 24%, with unique buyers on the network spiking by 34% in September alone. The opposite has been the case for Ethereum, with the network recording a consistent drop in trading volume since April, despite hosting some of the largest NFT collections.

The NFT volume growth disparity between both blockchains has been attributed to transaction fees. Unlike Ethereum, Solana offers users notable low transaction fees. Apart from low transaction fees, investors are also trooping towards the network because of its fast transaction speeds. Live data from the Solana blockchain explorer shows that the network currently processes 2,495 transactions per second (TPS). Ethereum only manages a fraction of that, with an average rate of 27.15 TPS.

Source: Solana Blockchain Explorer

Solana’s Network Outage Woes Persists

On September 30, the Solana blockchain suffered an outage for the sixth time in 2022. Due to the unfortunate event, the native token SOL suffered a sharp decline, which led to a three-day price retreat to $32.00.

The announcement came from the Solana Status page on Twitter, which noted that developers were working on restarting the network due to its unresponsiveness. Commenting on the possible cause of the outage, Stakewiz, an entity running a validator node on Solana, explained:

“The Solana mainnet network will be restarted at slot 153139220, the last confirmed slot. It appears a misconfigured node caused an unrecoverable partition in the network. Validators, please participate in finding consensus on the relevant data.”

Source: Twitter

On October 4, Stakewiz announced on Twitter that the issue that triggered the recent outage had been rectified with a system upgrade and called on validators to implement the upgrade.

Source: Twitter

Ironically, the Solana blockchain came three days after network developers published three steps that would prevent the particular outage from occurring a little while back.

What Is Solana Price Doing?

Solana has been on a sideways pattern for the last few days, although maintaining a slight upward curve. At the time of writing, the cryptocurrency is on the verge of breaking above the $34.00 resistance mark as it prepares for a possible jump to the $36.00 mark in the coming days.

SOL/USD 4-Hour Chart on TradingView

However, there might be a bearish flag in the making, which could lead to a sharp drop after attaining the $36.00 price sighting to the $30.50 region.

SOL Statistics Data

SOL Current Price: $33.85

SOL Market Cap: $12.02B

SOL Circulating Supply: 355.2M

SOL Total Supply: 511.6M

SOL Market Ranking: #9

Trade SOL now

Disclaimer

This article should not be taken as a piece of financial advice. It is essential to conduct your research before making investment decisions.

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