The world of Solana NFTs has been a rollercoaster ride, with its fair share of highs and lows. It all began in August 2021 with the launch of the first Solana NFT marketplace, Solanart. While Solanart had the advantage of being the first mover, it soon became clear that they had dropped the ball. Greedy and lazy, they implemented a high listing fee that discouraged many creators and collectors from using their platform. As a result, Solana Art quickly fell into obscurity, with less than 10 active users per day.
Solanart started by a group of friends excited to launch their first collection, which inarguably became the trigger that kicked off Solana NFTs to a point that no other blockchain had experienced since Ethereum. With such a young ecosystem at the time, the only way to trade was via OTC (over-the-counter), which led the team to build a solution for this with the creation of Solanart, only hosting their collection, SolPunks. With time, now-blue chip projects such as SMB launched, followed by Degen Apes, the highest-volume collection on Solanart and the first one to reach 1M SOL in sales. As time went on more collections were onboarded, cementing Solanart as the market leader within the Solana community.
The Rise of Magic Eden: The Dominant Solana NFT Marketplace
In the wake of Solana Art's decline, a new player emerged on the scene: Magic Eden. This marketplace quickly grew in popularity, becoming the go-to destination for Solana NFTs. While Magic Eden made some mistakes along the way, they have since worked to repair those issues, cementing their position as the most bullish Solana NFT marketplace.
Magic Eden is the most popular NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain. Launched on September 17 of 2021, it was created as a marketplace competitor that could act as a home base for NFT collections on SOL.
The platform is widely heralded for three things: the simplicity of its tools, its focus on community, and the diversity of tokens that can be created and collected on the platform (but more on this later). In June 2022, Magic Eden raised $130M at a valuation of $1.6 billion. It goes without saying that this is a major feat for any startup, let alone one in the blockchain industry.
When NFTs first started to become popular, collectors often used OpenSea for everything. Whether for minting, collecting, trading, or auctioning NFTs, more often than not, the “world’s first and largest” NFT marketplace was the hub for it all.
But when OpenSea, sometimes called BrokenSea, would crash or otherwise go offline, there were only a few significant alternatives for most NFT endeavors. Users were forced to choose between Nifty Gateway, Rarible, MakersPlace, and a handful of other niche platforms. And the centrality of it all left NFT enthusiasts begging for more options.
In the absence of options, platforms like Magic Eden became a sight for sore eyes to those who had grown tired of jumping through hoops to trade NFTs. Yet, as the need for more NFT marketplaces has subsided, the desire for more usability and operability has grown.
The competition continues: Solsea innovates in the NFT world
The Solsea NFT marketplace, a product of the ALL.ART protocol. As the name heavily implies, it aimed to be a Solana equivalent to the then-Ethereum exclusive NFT marketplace, OpenSea.
Launched at the end of August 2021, Solsea introduced a number of groundbreaking features for users of its NFT marketplace. For example, its features included NFTs with embedded licenses, a rarity index for NFT collections, wallet funding through FTX, and integrated NFT minting.
It’s important to note that the marketplace Solanart actually launched before Solsea, in July 2021, and is generally recognized as the first Solana marketplace. Even so, Solsea painted itself as the first open Solana NFT marketplace. A number of Solana NFT marketplaces launched not too long after Solsea did, providing further competition. The main two being Digital Eyes and Magic Eden.
What was the first NFT on Solana?
Now that we know the history of the NFT market on Solana, we are curious as to which was the first NFT in the history of the magnificent blockchain that we all love?
Although there is muchdebate about which was the first NFT Project created in the Solana network, there is only one reality, and if there is one thing we know about the Blockchain, it is that it does not lie.
This is the first transaction of a NFT mint in Solana:
https://explorer.solana.com/tx/4HqFpv5WUQAfKeqPrnfUnmNB3HabSL5Q31H5upMBZKEYC4CzTDFqNnTY5KDXcU59LsQsNQFeNJ9XL98msg5fKewe
Kreechures are the 1st NFT project on Solana was born on 26 March 2021. There was no NFT metadata standard at that time. No standard place to store images/etc. There wasn't anything like this on Solana at the time. No big collection and certainly no big collection that wants to include a game. I mention all of this because at the time, creating a collection like this on Solana was a little crazy.
Yes, this animal you see was the first NFT ever created at Solana. It belongs to the Kreechures collection, the very first collection from which an NFT was minted. It was not the first one to be sold out, and certainly not the best known.
Originally the total supply of the collection was 20k NFTs, but Kreechures did not get enough notoriety to sell them and after some time with the public mint available they burned the remaining supply, changing the supply to 5,000.
These 5k NFTs are made up of 49 "species" of Kreechures that are divided into 3 rarities. But the reality is that Kreechures have not had the relevance they could have as Solana's first collection, unlike other OG projects we will discuss below.
The most expensive Solana NFT collection
At the time of writing this article, the most expensive NFT collection in the Solana ecosystem, that is, the NFT that has the most value at its lowest price, belongs to Mad lads, with a value of $78.7 SOL with the average price of Solana being around $10,600 (crazy).
Launched in April 2023 by the creative minds at Backpack, Mad Lads has become more than just a collection of edgy characters. It’s a thriving community powerhouse built on Solana, fueled by innovation, utility, and a shared passion for the future of NFTs.
The story of Mad Lads begins with Backpack, a pioneering Solana-based project focused on developing user-friendly crypto wallets and allowing accessibility within the blockchain space.
Recognizing the NFT market and its potential to empower creators and communities, the Backpack team embarked on a mission to create a unique NFT collection.
The initial mint price was 6.9 SOL per NFT. As the minting process concluded, 10,000 Mad Lad NFTs found new homes, marking the official birth of a thriving Solana NFT community.
Last Words
It is necessary to know the history and trajectory of blockchain projects, in this case Solana, which boomed and created new millionaires in 2022. Sadly, at that time I did not have solid knowledge of Solana and I could not invest in any collection that could have currently made x10. I am still on the hunt for new potential collections to make a profit, for the rest I keep researching everything about Solana, which is a blockchain with great potential.
If you learned something new today, do not hesitate to leave it in the comments and your mega like.
Resources
Solanart Docs
Magic Eden Medium
Solsea Docs
Kreechures Docs
Search engines