Is Solana [SOL] NFT market in trouble? Here’s what you should definitely know

The crypto market has been reeling under bearish pressure for quite some time now. But a few altcoins have defied the current market structure. One such alt was Solana. In the last seven days, SOL was up by 16.06%. However, there still remain concerns related to some of its on-chain metrics.

What’s up with Solana?

The Solana NFT market seemed to be cruising as it entered May. With a very productive April, the NFT markets were also expected to boom through the mid-season. In fact, the NFT volume on Solana reached its all-time high at $446 million. The high- lofty expectations were brought down with the Terra crash. Consequently, Solana has not been able to maintain the high NFT sales with volume drying down after the Terra debacle.

Source: Santiment

The Solana TVL in DeFi has also decreased gradually with increasing aversion towards risk assets in the market. At press time, the total value on Solana stood at $4.22 billion which is the lowest since September 2021.

Interestingly, the Solana TVL stood at $11.22 billion at the start of the year. This means a massive loss of more than 60% has taken place indicating the worrisome state of the market.

Source: The Block

While NFT sales and DeFi TVL are expected to grow as the market stabilizes, network issues continue to persist on Solana. Notably, co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko recently proposed changes to fix network congestion.

Solana releases the testate

After seeing network issues persist on the blockchain, the Solana Foundation released updates to fix the issues. Anatoly Yakovenko announced the features of the v1.10.15 testnet on Twitter. He believes, the latest testnet can significantly curb the transaction throughput issues at ease and radically improve the network.

The testnet is a threefold upgrade process allowing users to improve the network experience through a series of changes. The first upgrade is access to Quick UDP Internet Connection (QUIC) which will lead to a reduced latency on the network.

The second upgrade is the implementation of stake-weighted transactions “that should prevent unstaked or staked bots from eating up all the bandwidth.”

However, this implementation is still in its “rudimentary” stage and “will take time to get right.” The last upgrade is releasing fee prioritization for users. This is another upgrade in its early stages. The Foundation still wants to make sure that this feature does not lead to higher fees for all network users.