SOLANA DIMS AGAIN

Solana, second only to Ethereum in terms of projects developed on its network, had some good news marred by bad this past week.

On the heels of recording a surge in NFT activity, the decentralized network experienced its fourth outage since January.

News of the outage was reported via Solana Status, a Twitter account reportedly associated with the Solana Foundation:

“The Solana network is experiencing an outage and not processing transactions. Developers across the ecosystem are working on diagnosing the issue and to restart the network. More information will be provided as it becomes available.

“— Solana Status (@SolanaStatus) October 1, 2022”

The outage actually commenced on Friday night, 30 September, according to crypto outlet theblock.co.

A serious problem with a validator node on the network, which was creating duplicate blocks of data, resulted in other nodes not being able to verify which block was correct, and a network fork occurred, said experts.

Some suggested the network did not have a fail-over mechanism that could have avoided a network shutdown over the issue.

The network managed to go back online after a decision to restart the network from the last confirmed slot before the issue began.

There was a silver lining for Solana, besides being back online. Several outlets reported that the network achieved its highest ever number of NFTs minted on the chain in early September.

Part of the success owed to SudoAMM, an NFT platform which has seen controversy surrounding its decision not to incorporate royalty features for NFT creators.

On other NFT platforms like OpenSea, NFT creators can opt to receive as much as 10 percent in royalties each time an NFT they created is resold.

Creators have decried the lack of royalty features on SudoAMM. But the platform has done 50 million in trading since its launch, theblock.co noted, showing that royalty-free NFT trading can attract business.

In terms of network efficiencies, NFT creation on Solana is considerably cheaper and faster than on Ethereum. Solana has managed to attract a number of projects that previously had operated on the Ethereum network.

NFT SALES DROP OFF A DIGITAL CLIFF

The craze for NFT digital art and other assets might just be the most dramatic casualty of the so-called “crypto winter.”

Bloomberg has reported that NFT trading volume came in at 466 million in September.

That’s a precipitous decline from the 17 billion in volume reached at the start of the year.

While many sectors have been hard hit by economic recession and skyrocketing inflation, the crypto industry, which had exploded into mainstream awareness in 2021, has been among the most affected.

And within cryptos, the NFT market is perhaps the biggest loser.

Part of the problem with NFTs has been the focus on the relatively narrow use case of “digital art” ownership.

Whimsical collections like Crypto Punks and Bored Apes saw their prices skyrocket in 2021 as enthusiasts flush with new crypto wealth splurged on visuals that could serve as trendy emblems and status symbols.

That’s over, at least for the time being.

But NFTs likely are not going away, because the technology has much wider application than conferring ownership and validating provenance of digital art.

Some wider potential of NFTS have been detailed in articles including “NFTS: MUCH MORE THAN DIGITAL ART” (15 Feb 2022) and “NFTs COULD BE ‘BIGGER THAN CRYPTO,’ COINBASE CEO SAYS” (16 Nov 2021), “MICKEY MOVE OVER: THERE’S A NEW M-WORD AT DISNEY” (27 Sep 2022)  and “ONE OF A KIND: THE WORLD OF NFTs” (10 Aug 2021).