The Solana Blockchain has been experiencing a decline in the number of non-fungible tokens (NFT) mints in the last two months. According to data from BanklessTimes, the daily NFT mints on the platform fell from 146,782 on June 10th, 2022, to 98,647 on August 10th, 2022. That's a difference of 48,108 representing a 33% drop.
BanklessTimes.com CEO Jonathan Merry has attributed this decline to several factors. He explained,
Again, there has been a general decline in cryptocurrency prices across the board. This could discourage people from investing in new tokens and cause them to hold on to what they have instead.
Additionally, the Solana team has been focused on developing the mainnet and hasn't been promoting the platform as much as they did in the early days. This may have also contributed to the decline in NFT mints.
Lastly, the Solana Blockchain has been facing some competition from other platforms. For example, EOS has been growing in popularity and offering similar features. That could be causing some users to switch over to other platforms instead.
Since the beginning of the year, Solana has been experiencing a wave of outages, with one in January lasting 18 hours. Most of these stability issues arise from the influx of bots into the platform.
The blockchain went dark for seven hours in April due to a significant rush of bots that forced the network to fall out of consensus and crash. The incident arose from bot traffic overwhelming the Candy Machine program, which allows users to mint NFTs on the Solana blockchain.
This is not the first time that Solana's stability has been called into question. The network has suffered several outages in recent months as it struggles to cope with the increasing number of transactions being made on it.
Solana's instability has caused users frustration and raised concerns about the network's reliability. Some have even questioned whether or not Solana is stable enough to be used for commercial purposes.
Solana is an excellent platform for those who want to create scalable apps. However, one issue that Solana currently lacks is a fee market to control spam or sudden surges in traffic.
Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko proposed adopting this measure in January and reiterated it in May. Fee markets are essential in controlling these types of issues, and it's something that Solana will need to implement if it wants to be a truly great platform.
Despite these issues (outages), Solana remains one of the most popular blockchains in use today, thanks to its ability to process large numbers of transactions quickly and efficiently. It has a strong team, innovative technology, and a large community.
