The market’s 9th largest cryptocurrency (SOL) has seen it all here. From heading north and hitting new ATHs to diving south by succumbing to network outages.
However, one aspect of SOL’s dominance continues to see bullish strides within different playgrounds/battlegrounds.
A beautiful skyline
Many investors/traders have something to cherish amid the broader crypto-market’s inconsistent movements.
Consider this – Solana’s Non-fungible Token (NFT) ecosystem just surpassed a significant milestone. As per CryptoSlam, the Solana blockchain surpassed $1 billion in all-time total volume this month for the first time.
At the time of writing, sales volume stood at around $1.2 billion, with the same highlighted by the graph attached herein. 
Source: CryptoSlamIndeed, Solana has established itself as a major player within this competitive market. In fact, according to Messari’s latest blog, one specific project helped the flagship protocol’s ascent to the aforementioned milestone.
Launched in 2021, Metaplex became the main protocol and permissionless infrastructure layer for NFTs on Solana. Since its launch, the Metaplex on-chain minting program has powered over 16 million out of the 18 million NFTs minted on Solana. Well, thanks to Candy Machine V1 (launched in late-August 2021) and V2 (launched in December 2021).
Other NFT minting solutions such as LaunchMyNFT and Magic Eden’s Launchpad (V1 and V2) too played an important role. Overall, the number of NFTs minted grew by 46% QoQ in Q2 2022.
Source: Messari
In addition, Metaplex witnessed a daily average of almost 76,000 owners of Metaplex-enabled NFTs who bought or sold an NFT each day. This marked a 21% uptick from the previous quarter. Furthermore, the average number of daily transactions grew 18% QoQ.
Source: Messari
Overall, “the increase in the number of unique wallet addresses and NFT transactions on Solana daily shows healthy usage activity for the Metaplex network,” Messari added.
Such datasets sketch a positive trajectory for the flagship blockchain network, especially looking at the progress. For instance, in 2021, Solana’s highest weekly trade volumes hit $160.39 million. Certainly, a small percentage of what the record is today.
The ecosystem recently also updated the community about the growing active addresses on Solana’s dApps. Gaming platform Gameta went on to top these charts with over 50.11k users, as discussed in a previous article.
No signs of fading?
Solana did narrate bullish scenarios on the discussed green ‘NFT’ card. However, signs of uncertainty are still there. Of late, a flurry of negative events, including repeated network outages, centralization concerns and a widespread exploit, have targeted Solana wallets.
These were all major setbacks for SOL investors. In fact, they may be why SOL’s price didn’t quite perform as expected. At press time, SOL was trading just shy of the $48-mark on CoinMarketCap.
