Solana has a new punching bag in the NFT market, and it’s none other than…

Despite the bleak NFT action in 2022, trends continue to emerge from this market for two main guests. Firstly, Ethereum [ETH], the king altcoins and Solana [SOL], the so-called ‘Ethereum killer’. But did this killer have the strength to beat the king within the NFT battleground?

All hail the King

Was ETH really the king within the NFT market at press time? The press time statistics stated a different picture. Ethereum’s NFT volume in terms of dollar fell by ~90% from January, with average sales less than $1 billion per month in Q3. Simply put, sales averaged less than $1 billion per month in Q3 as compared to $4.6 billion in Q2.

Additionally, the decline highlighted not only a slowing market for NFTs, but also a drop in ETH’s price which most NFTs use as their base currency.

Here’s another surprise for the ETH NFT clan — but this time a good one indeed. Azuki, unlike other digital collectibles, saw a significant spark in sales volume due to the latest release. Following the release, the sales volume surged by nearly 1,168% as per data on CryptoSlam, registered >$2 million in sales.

In fact, it stood at the #1 spot on both CryptoSlam and OpenSea, the largest NFT market places.

Source: CryptoSlam

Now what led to this surge?

The popular NFT project Azuki released the PBT (Physical Backed Token) to bind real objects to the blockchain. PBT will use the BEAN chip, which can generate asymmetric key pairs, achieve decentralized authentication, and track ownership of physical items. The team behind this project took to Twitter to highlight this development.

Introducing the Physical Backed Token (PBT): an open source token standard tying a physical item to a digital token on the Ethereum blockchain. pic.twitter.com/iXavmJR5xv

— Azuki (@AzukiOfficial) October 17, 2022

Launched on 12 January, 2022, Azuki is a collection of 10,000 avatars that grants exclusive membership access to a corner of the internet where Web3 enthusiasts, builders, and artists (collectively called The Garden) link up to create a decentralized future.

In addition to this, other successful projects, such as CryptoPunks and MAYC too made a comeback on the red carpet.

Meet the challenger 

Solana and Ethereum continued to battle over the NFT industry supremacy. Solana’s growing momentum stalled a bit, although it remained visible. Several volume spikes were recorded in September and October 2022 whereas Ethereum’s volume went south.

Source: CryptoSlam

Furthermore, NFT sales on the Solana blockchain surpassed $1 billion in all-time total volume this month for the first time, according to the NFT sales tracker CryptoSlam. Doing so, it outperformed Ethereum by registering massive growth in terms of total NFT sales in the last month.

Herein, it also managed to grow by more than 100%, while Ethereum registered a negative 18% growth during the last 30 days. Although, individual projects on SOL had somewhat of a mixed reception as tweeted by Messari here.

3/ While a @sudoswap fork gains market share on @solana, sudoswap itself has lost its steam, with volumes down 80% from its peak.

Sudoswap has managed to retain its market share gains hovering around 5%. pic.twitter.com/4EHQFanYyx

— Messari (@MessariCrypto) October 17, 2022

But needless to say that Solana NFTs were gaining ground as compared to ETHs. But could the former actually have the legs to surpass the king of altcoins?

Well, let’s wait and watch.