By : Rasha Hussein
The Solana Blockchain has been experiencing a decline in the number of non-fungible tokens (NFT) mints in the last two months. According to data from BanklessTimes.com, the daily NFT mints on the platform fell from 146, 782 on June 10th, 2022, to 98,647 on August 10th, 2022. That's a difference of 48, 108 representing a 33% drop.
Banklesstimes CEO Jonathan Merry has attributed this decline to several factors. He explained, "One reason for the decline in the NFT mints is that the novelty of NFTs has worn off. Some users are now opting for other cryptocurrencies or tokens instead. Additionally, overall market volatility has caused investors to shy away from NFTs, preferring more traditional forms of investment instead."
Other Reasons For The Decline
Again, there has been a general decline in cryptocurrency prices across the board. This could discourage people from investing in new tokens and cause them to hold on to what they have instead.
Additionally, the Solana team has been focused on developing the mainnet and hasn't promoted the platform as much as they did in the early days. This may have also contributed to the decline in NFT mints.
Lastly, the Solana Blockchain has been facing some competition from other platforms. For example, EOS has been growing in popularity and offering similar features. That could be causing some users to switch over to other platforms instead.
Solana's Stability Woes
Since the beginning of the year, Solana has been experiencing a wave of outages, with one outage in January lasting 18 hours. Most of these stability issues arise from the influx of bots into the platform.
The blockchain went dark for seven hours in April due to a significant rush of bots that forced the network to fall out of consensus and crash. The incident arose from bot traffic overwhelming the Candy Machine program, which allows users to mint NFTs on the Solana blockchain.
Tackling Solana's Stability Issues
Solana is an excellent platform for those who want to create scalable apps. However, one issue that Solana currently lacks is a fee market to control spam or sudden surges in traffic.
