The Battle of the Solana NFT Aggregator

Flipside Crypto Bounty Program

Introduction

To take us all out of the boredom and downtrends in this bear market, Solana NFT ecosystem has come out with a new innovation - NFT AMM marketplaces. These allow users to explore all different marketplaces in Solana through a single point of entry. Similarly to DEX AMMs, where the path to exchange two different assets in the more effective way is calculated automatically by the DEX, a NFT AMM finds the best price for a NFT amongst all compatible marketplaces. This opens the competition to marketplaces and, in the middle of a heavy discussion regarding creator fees or royalties, it has sparked a very hot “Trader October” season.

This dashboard will take a look at Coral Cube and Hyperspace, two popular NFT aggregators on Solana and compared them with Hadeswap, another AMM marketplace that introduces the NFT liquidity pools - equivalent to LP for token swaps but for NFTs, increasing liquidity and allowing users to provide both an NFT and SOL to a pool to earn swaps fees each time a NFT gets bought from the pool. More info can be found in the documentation.

Analysis

Comparison between NFT Marketplace Aggregators

Three metrics are calculated for each marketplace:

Total NFT sales (transactions)
Total NFT sales volume (SOL)
Total daily unique buyers

While Coral Cube has more transactions and volume than Hyperspace, the average amount per sale is much bigger in Hyperspace that in Coral Cube, hinting that more expensive NFTs are traded. Also, Coral Cube has 6 times more daily unique buyers.

In terms of volume, Hadeswap more than doubles Coral Cube, but with less than half of the transactions and a third of its user base.

Below, a graph showing the % of market share for each marketplace can be seen, showing how Hadeswap went to almost 20% of the sales volume in Solana on October 9th, with Coral Cube and Hyperspace around 8% and 5% respectively. After October 15th, situation reversed and reached September levels very rapidly.

A scatter plot for sales volume in SOL and number of transactions by marketplace confirms that Coral Cube takes more transactions to get similar amount of sales volumes compared to the other two.

Methodology

The analyses were done querying the solana.core.fact_nft_sales table aggregating the transactions, sales amounts and distinct purchasers by date and marketplace. Buyers therefore are accounted once per day (daily unique buyers) but one same buyer can operate multiples days get counted different times. The chosen timeframe was since October 1st since data for all three platforms was not available before September 22nd and the action took place around October 15th.

For the popular collections queries, a join with the solana.core.dim_nft_metadata was done. Collections not labelled in the tables are not taken into account for the calculation.

Overall Solana NFT Market

October begun with Magic Eden as the clear dominant marketplace with 80% of the total Solana NFT volume. But compared to mid September, the giant was losing market share to other marketplaces which where using different approaches to royalties. Some time ago, Yaww allowed users to decide the royalty fee they wanted to pay to the project creator and other followed. In October 15th, Magic Eden also [adopted optional royalties](https://when 'magic eden v2' then 'magic eden') to fight back and regain a 20% marketshare on the same day.

After all the controversy, it looks like Magic Eden’s strategy paid out - instead of having to fight with a lot of smaller marketplaces, is back to 90% dominace levels and has only to “worry” about Hadeswap which stands with 8% as of October 29th. The rest of the marketplaces have very low volumes in comparison.

Most Popular Collections

Below the most popular collections in terms of sales volume for each marketplace are visualised.

Coral Cube most popular collections have lower volume than for Hyperspace and Hadeswap. It is specially significant for Degods in Hyperspace (almost 8k SOL - around 13% of the total sales in October) and for ABC in Hadeswap (68k SOL - almost 30% of the total sales in October). This should come as no surprise since both projects belong to the same ecosystem - the first decentralized NFT Community. Once Hadeswap closes the beta , the platform will add trading fees and ABC NFT holders will be able to earn some of them. Guess it is not the end of the royalties discussions!

The main reason to choose one platform over the other seems to be the collection I am looking for to buy or sell and the fees I am willing to pay - 0% buyers fee in Hyperspace and optional royalties and 0.5% marketplace fee in Coral Cube.