At the beginning of this month, the Bitcoin network was overloaded with transactions coming from two new uses viz Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and the mint of altcoins. The resulting congestion became so extreme that people thought the network was under attack. Now the network has become more popular than Solana for NFTs.
Bitcoin wildly popular for NFTs
Dat is evident from on-chain data from The Block. End of April trading volume of NFTs on Solana (SOL) was even higher than on Bitcoin (BTC), because then there was hardly any trading in the blockchain images on Bitcoin. This has changed with the enormous increase in popularity.
The week is not over yet, but at the time of writing, $14.3 million worth of NFTs have already been traded on the Bitcoin blockchain. On Solana it is about 8.4 million dollars. So only Ethereum (ETH) is bigger, that network has already processed NFT transactions worth $ 40.5 million this week.
In the week of May 8, the difference was even greater with Solana and Bitcoin trading volumes of $9.3 million and $51.5 million, respectively. That week formed the peak, then Ordinals really broke through. Even relative to the volume on Ethereum, the increase was startling, which processed some $91.6 million that week.
So Bitcoin was more than half the size of Ethereum in this area. Pretty impressive, for something that can only be used for a few months on Bitcoin. If you include all the blockchains that you can mint NFTs on, it handled about 30% of all on-chain NFT transactions.
NFT market has shrunk sharply
Now the hype seems to have died down quite a bit, and that is reflected in the trading volume. The difference between that of Bitcoin and Solana has now narrowed to ‘just’ 5.9 million. Bitcoin is now about 70% larger than Solana for this purpose. Moreover, the volume is now 20% of the total market, not 30% anymore.
At the beginning of this week we wrote that the volume has not been as low as it is now in almost two years. So the contraction has not been limited to Bitcoin.