As I start writing this, it’s currently 2:13 am. I’m waiting to mint Cryptografs which I got a whitelist for, questioning the risk/reward and also my life choices. The whitelist meta has pretty painful for anyone living in Australia. The previous mint which I had my eye on was Sovana which had their sale at 2:30PM UTC (1:30am my time) and most mints seem to happen dead of the night.
Flipping mints in Sol from 1 to 3–4 hardly seems worth it despite it being a 100–300% gain when in reality it’s only a few hundred bucks. While the majority of the market has their attention on mints, the real value (and also fun) seems to be accumulating on secondary markets and betting on teams that have consistently been building while liquidity shifts from mint to mint.
Coming from Eth land, the no gas fees in Sol has made it super enjoyable to interact with the marketplaces and also minting. Oh my mint failed? No worries, I’ll just keep spamming the mint button until it goes through and not pay anything. Listing on marketplaces is also a breeze with negligible fees. On Opensea, you’d have to pay gas whenever you list a new collection and also take a mental note of including gas in your overall purchase price.
The curse of low gas fees is that I’ve been finding myself make more transactions on Sol because each decision is less punishing. Compare Magic Eden’s, Solana’s most popular marketplace (for now) vs Opensea transactions. 6.92m vs 83.24k is insane.
Comparing the ecosystem to Eth, a few concepts are a lot more obvious than others because of how immature the market is. E.g: considering where you are on the information totem pole. On this note, it’s also been fun (but unhelpful) to watch accounts that share alpha progressively become shitposters as they get more popular.
The space has also been abundant with rugs which sucks up liquidity from an already small market, most recent one coming to mind is Balloonsville.
The current market also doesn’t seem to favour innovation/community building but rather Eth derivatives such as Bored Ape Solana Club and SolPunks. The fact that they can sustain higher floor prices than projects that are actually building is…not good.
I’m in two minds about whether to try and keep up with both ecosystems or just monitor Sol closely for now. I’m anticipating a lot more mainstream adoption (e.g Coachella) in Sol due to low fees and meeting the environment friendly narrative, whereas with Eth, you’re kind of priced out of actively participating if your bankroll is under 10k.
For now, I’m still having a lot of fun in Solana and have high hopes for the future. My plays will most likely involve accumulating more Famous Fox Federation and Solgods which both fit the community/project building criteria throughout this whole cycle.
If you’re also interested in following along with the most recent Sol NFT price action or learning more about the space, here are some of my favourite Sol accounts to follow.