The Solana NFT ecosystem has seen some bumpy rides in the recent time, since the FTX downfall last year, and one of the major reasons was the token pricing where SOL went to a single-digit price before slowly picking itself up to more than double the bottom that it reached. The big positive for the NFT ecosystem was that the holders and Solana community stayed together to see the market hold as it is, even if the prices of NFTs tanked for a while.
While all seem a bit settled, Frank, co-founder of DeGods announced that the top collections on Solana, i.e. DeGods and Y00ts would move out of Solana, to Ethereum and Polygon chains respectively. There began the division of the community, with some leaving the Solana space with these two collections, while some chose to stick around and help continue running the space and vibing with the rest of the communities. In 2023, we’ve seen very few good new collections launching on Solana, but with DeGods and Y00ts bridging to other chains, are there any that would replace them to be the leaders and the blue chips of the SOL NFT ecosystem?
Here are the Sol NFT projects that I feel would be taking ahead the NFT ecosystem and defining themselves as the blue chips of Solana.
- Mad Lads
- Claynosaurz
- Famous Fox Federation
- AssetDash Vanta
- Degenerate Ape Academy
- Solana Monkey Business
- oogy
- Okay Bears
- LILY
- Smyths
The reasoning for each is different, but with how things have been with regard to the community they are building and how people have been bullish on each of them.
Claynosaurz has been building around IP creation and excellent content, and it has one of the best animated NFT collections on any chain. Check out the thread I had done to tell why I am bullish on Claynosaurz and the brand – Read here.
Mad Lads is a collection from Backpack, and ever since the mint, this collection has been called the next DeGods. Mad Lads had minted at 6.9 SOL and for a large collection of 10000, there’s a reason why the floor climbed to over 80 SOL in a matter of few days. Backpack is a Solana wallet that is available for the web as an extension, with mobile wallets coming soon for both Android and iOS. This is more a brand than just a regular NFT project offering utilities.
oogy is a community-driven art collection of 10000 NFTs, and they have been building a strong community since the mint. While there are a few things down the roadmap, the art is what will keep it community-front going forward, and oogy does have a good number of influencers who are known well in the Solana ecosystem.
AssetDash is a portfolio tracker app that is available for both, Android devices and iPhones. They recently minted a collection AssetDash Vanta at 5.5 SOL each, which got minted out within minutes for the size of 10000 NFTs, and the floor price went to double the mint price within a couple of days after the mint.
Smyths was earlier called Blocksmith Labs, and they had amazing tools for the Solana ecosystem, where newer minting collections were handling whitelisting of users, and more. Smyths has seen some competition from Subber in recent times, but the new Atlas tool from Smyths has been proving quite good and the holders of Smyths get whitelists pretty easily.
Some of the older collections from my list are Solana Monkey Business, Okay Bears, Degenerate Ape Academy, and Famous Fox Federation. These OG collections should have easily captured the top spots, but they didn’t for many reasons. This shouldn’t make you go against them as they still are good builders and Smyths, and FFF have been developing tools for Solana and for the entire NFT ecosystem.
What do you feel are the best SOL collections you are bullish on? Comment and share your thoughts.
