Following months of leaks, teasers, and online speculation, OpenSea poked a little fun at its plans to add Solana as the best-kept secret in Web3, hinting that Solana support would be coming in April. Until the announcement, OpenSea had been blank regarding when Solana-NFTs would have been available for trading.
OpenSea is the largest NFT marketplace, commonly called the “Amazon of NFTs.” This is because OpenSea is incredibly intuitive, user-friendly, and supports most types of digital files.
Being a billion-dollar company pioneering the advent of NFTs also helps.
A new blockchain coming to OpenSea is big news, and it’s officially live.
The update was uploaded on Twitter, confirming OpenSea’s plan to add Solana NFTs to the platform.
That was until they tweeted the following verbatim statement:
“The moment you’ve been waiting for… @solana is officially on OpenSea – starting today, with our initial beta!”
OpenSea is mainly based on the Ethereum blockchain and serves as the primary marketplace in the NFT trading space. Now that Solana is part of the equation, OpenSea will feature the availability of NFTs from the second-largest NFT blockchain out of Ethereum and its layer-2 scaling solutions.
What does Solana support mean for OpenSea?
In other words, if OpenSea was big beforehand, now it would be even more significant. According to Opensea’s official statement through Twitter, Solana has been added with limited collection coverage. OpenSea supports roughly 165 collections, though the number is ever-increasing every day as more collections are minted on Solana and optimized to function with OpenSea. Major Solana NFT collections include Solana Monkey Business, Aurory, and Degenerate Ape Academy.
The news had caused an increase in SOL’s pricing, reaching a monthly high of $143.54 before it went back down.
What is the Solana blockchain?
Solana is a crypto computing platform to achieve the highest possible transaction speed without hurting its decentralization.
The Solana blockchain also rose even higher in popularity after SOL got a boost from a famous NFT project: Degenerate Ape Academy. Being the first major NFT project to launch on Solana, it caused people to flock over to Solana as an alternative to Ethereum.
The Solana blockchain has many pros and cons, differentiating it from the Ethereum blockchain. First of all, Solana can process 50,000 transactions per second with gas fees lower than $.01, reaching record-breaking levels of scalability by employing the Proof of History method.
Proof of history creates a historical record that proves that an event has happened at a specific time, very different from every other blockchain.
Solana serves as both a cryptocurrency and a platform for running crypto apps, one of the fastest available to the public. Solana is fast enough that there’s practically no congestion and fees are low compared to Ethereum. For example, Ethereum processes an average of 15 transactions per second.
Magic Eden is the largest NFT marketplace on Solana, and though it handles a volume easily in the hundreds of millions of NFT sales every month, OpenSea is handles billions of dollars on the same timespan. There are chances that performance might decrease depending on how Solana NFT functionality is optimized.
What is SOL?
SOL is the native cryptocurrency of Solana. It’s used to pay transaction fees, staking and provides holders with voting rights for future upgrades. It’s one of the competitors with Ethereum and became notorious as an altcoin in August 2021, when prices rose from $30 at the start of the month to $75 three weeks after.
If you’re interested in purchasing SOL, you’ve come to the right place. Because SOL is one of the most notorious altcoins, it’s available on most major and minor crypto exchanges. Some of the most popular exchanges for purchasing SOL include Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, and Crypto.com
What is an NFT marketplace?
An NFT marketplace is an online market for purchasing NFTs and other digital assets. It allows you to buy art, music, and even whole virtual worlds. Some of the most popular NFT marketplaces include OpenSea, Rarible, Foundation, Nifty Gateway, and Axie Infinity Marketplace. Learn more about NFT marketplaces by reading this article.
How to sell Solana NFTs on OpenSea
To better understand how Solana would work on OpenSea, we analyzed the support article available on OpenSea’s help center here.
Using Solana for an NFT transaction is hardly different from using Ethereum. However, do note that Solana is a separate blockchain from Ethereum, so you need a Solana-compatible wallet to purchase Solana-based NFTs in OpenSea. OpenSea provides support for Phantom and Glow, two major Solana wallet providers.
You can now buy and list Solana NFTs with a fixed price, though Solana NFT auctions aren’t yet supported on OpenSea. There are plans to optimize these as soon as possible.
You can transfer NFTs from one Solana wallet to another while on OpenSea.
You can view Solana NFT collection and item pages, properties, and stats.
You can also edit your collection page and enjoy real-time NFT creator earnings with a max of four separate payout addresses.
The good news doesn’t stop there, as you’ll also find exciting features on OpenSea that aren’t available on other Solana marketplaces.
The primary noted advantage is how OpenSea is an escrow-less Solana marketplace. Most traditional Solana marketplaces require you to escrow or lend an NFT to the marketplace while listing it for sale. If you list a Solana NFT on OpenSea, it’ll stay in your wallet, and you’ll never have to escrow your Solana NFTs.
The escrow-less listing also allows you to use your NFTs on different platforms, such as games, discord communities, and NFT galleries.
Solana NFTs tend to be purchased with SOL, but considering how OpenSea mainly uses ETH, many NFT traders might not have enough SOL in their wallets to purchase Solana NFTs.
OpenSea provides you with the option to purchase SOL from MoonPay at the time of purchase if you don’t have enough SOL in your wallet. MoonPay is a third-party app that constructs payment infrastructure for crypto, converting fiat currencies and cryptocurrencies into all sorts of wallets and platforms.
OpenSea displays all NFTs available within a collection, whether they are for sale or not, which is an advantage over marketplaces that only show NFTs for sale. You can explore items contained in a Solana collection and receive and accept offers without listing them first.
Remember that only the Solana NFTs you’ve purchased on OpenSea will be visible in your account. The item’s history will only show transaction events that’ve taken place in OpenSea and not other Solana marketplaces. If you’re using the Phantom Solana wallet, you can view all your NFTs regardless.
How to buy Solana NFTs on OpenSea?
The first thing you’ll need to buy NFTs on OpenSea using Solana is a Solana-based wallet and SOL.
Connecting and funding a Solana-based wallet is not too different from doing the same with an Ethereum-based crypto wallet such as Metamask.
Then, browse which Solana NFTs interest you on OpenSea. To do this, a good starting point is the OpenSea Solana landing page, which will present you with a couple of featured collections. You can also browse all collections by clicking the Explore Collections button.
Once you’ve decided on which NFT you’d like to purchase, there are a couple of ways to do this on OpenSea. First, click “Buy Now” or bid on the NFT that piqued your interest.
You should review the NFT’s total and once you confirm that everything’s in the right place, click “Confirm checkout,” and you’ll finally be able to buy it.
If the NFT isn’t yet available for sale, you can bid by clicking on “Make Offer” The wallet will then prompt you to approve a signature request, and the funds will show up in your wallet sidebar on OpenSea as “Solana Offer Balance.”
Pros and cons of OpenSea NFTs on Solana
Some of the main traits of having Solana on OpenSea include keeping NFTs in your wallet until they are sold and taking advantage of the ultra-low gas fees and transaction fees on Solana.
Finally, to those concerned with the effect of NFTs on the environment, transactions on Solana use a minimal amount of energy thanks to the proof of history method used by the Solana blockchain. This means that Solana uses less energy than a couple of Google searches in their own words.
Final words about Solana NFTs on OpenSea
Solana being available on OpenSea is a big step in the right direction for NFT traders. It made an already massive and user-friendly NFT marketplace even better, providing ETH with environmentally friendly and lower cost options.
If Solana has already collaborated with OpenSea, the chances are that other blockchain platforms will seek to collaborate with OpenSea or perhaps other marketplaces such as Rarible.
Learn more about “What are NFTs” and how you can benefit from NFT trading by reading our other articles here.
