Introduction

This dashboard looks into the distribution of all NFT sales on Solana by sale price in SOL, and considers what Solana NFT prices may look like in the future.

Method

I calculated the summary statistics: the lowest sale price, the highest price, the average, and the median price (the price for the 50th percentile transaction, with half the sales netting mroe and the other half netting less).

I then proceeded to group Solana NFT sales into tiers by sale price: below 1 SOL, 1-10, 10-100, 100-1,000, and 1,000+ SOL. Each of these intervals includes its lower bound and excludes its higher bound, except the first interval which does not include airdrops (where the sale price is free). Free drops are separated into their own tier. The second table shows the analysis for each of the tiers.

Data Results

What percentage of all sales have been above 1 SOL? Above 10 SOL?

55% of all sales that netted any positive amount (not including free airdrops) are small - under 1 SOL. Less than half of all sales (45%) brought in 1 SOL or more.

More than that, 96% of all sales were under 10 SOL. Only 4% of sales netted a higher price than 10 SOL per NFT.

But while the <1 SOL sales were the most numerous, it was the sales with single-digit prices (1-9 SOL) that collectively brought the most revenue (50% of total sales volume).

How many unique wallets have made a NFT purchase that was above 10 SOL? Above 100 SOL?

The above table reveals that the highest price someone has paid for an NFT on the Solana ecosystem is 5,000 SOL. The lowest price is a negligible amount (1e-9), which the above table automatically rounds down to 0 (otherwise, airdrops sent for free are excluded from the summary statistics).

Although the average NFT sale nets 2.46 SOL, half of all sale transactions are below .8 SOL.

Do you think that there is a limit to how high a floor for a NFT collection on Solana can reach compared to on Ethereum?

Several factors may play a role. One is overhead, which is especially important for the floor price, most of all for smaller creators with less expensive collections. The cost of minting an NFT includes gas, account fees, and listing fees. All three on Solana cost about 12 cents (when SOL is at $95, and even less when SOL price is lower; source). Meanwhile on Ethereum, the price of minting an NFT is much higher, as are transaction fees in general across the entire Ethereum ecosystem. An NFT could cost up to $123 to mint on Ethereum when ETH price was $2,490 (source ibid), which at the time of this writing is about a third higher. There is a free minting option on Ethereum ('lazy minting' where the buyer pays the price for the minting which happens at the time of purchase), but many sellers mint themselves and pay upfront. The higher price of minting on Ethereum is one of the factors that can push ETH NFT prices up, and keep SOL NFT prices lower, especially for lower-cost collections where margin is important to the artist.

Another factor is historical prices. Ethereum is known for its extremely expensive elite NFTs which cost in the tens of millions of dollars. As the analysis in this dashboard shows, the most expensive Solana NFT has sold for 5,000 SOL (approx. $500,000; conversion source).

Finally, a significant factor to consider is hype. One could argue that the lion's share of NFT trading prices is community expectations and valuations. Although NFT minting on Solana is newer and single-NFT price record is lower, there have already been some high-profile collection launches on Solana. One example is Okay Bears which netted $18 million in total sales, although each NFT had launched at a starting price of only 1.5 SOL ($145) source. Solana has shown that its projects can build as much hype as on Ethereum.

Overall, I would expect Solana NFTs to reach similar floor prices to Ethereum NFT floors in the medium to long term, especially collections with more hype and bigger-brand creators. This can be driven by community valuation and expectactions, if not by high overhead minting costs.

Image source: Twitter.

This analysis was created by catscatscode (Flipside, Twitter) for Flipside Crypto's "Solana NFT Purchasing Behavior" Solana bounty.