Why are most of Solana's NFT projects stored on Arweave?

2021-09-08 15:04

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Solana is cheaper, faster and more convenient for NFT, but Arweave is the default choice for many Solana projects.

Why Did Arweave and Solana win NFT Summer together?

Source: Arweave. News

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The Polynesian Ape Academ, Solana Monkey Business, Aurory, Sollamas, these are emerging Solana &NBSP; The most successful projects in the NFT ecosystem are all using Arweave.

Anyone who has been following the market lately will have noticed that Arweave and Solana have fluctuated in price, unlike other investment classes that are less exposed to bitcoin in general. It's no coincidence that the momentum of one project feeds on the momentum of the other -- Arweave and Solana are closely linked.

First, Solana's blockchain data is stored on Arweave via a Bridge called the SOLAR Bridge.

In July 2020, Solana announced a Gitcoin-funded SOLAR project on Medium. A month later, LoneRonin's Solarweave Bridge submission on GitHub was accepted and tested in production. By providing quick access to historical Solana data, Arweave eliminates the need for Solana validators to run the entire node. Despite increased demand, Arweave has played a key role in maintaining Solana's efficient performance.

Solana's low transaction fees, combined with its ability to process about 65,000 transactions per second, make it a strong competitor to Ethereum. Perhaps the only thing missing is mainstream adoption, but Solana is a new project that is not yet deeply embedded in crypto culture.

For NFT, Solana is cheaper, faster and more convenient. As with Ethereum, NFT assets are not stored on the chain. But for many Solana projects, Arweave is the default choice.

Why are so many Solana NFTs stored on Arweave?

Part of the reason may be that Arweave is well known in the Solana community. But one driver, to be sure, is Metaplex.

Metaplex is a set of tools that allows creators to easily build Arweave-Mintable NFTs on Solana and auction them using a customizable Web front end, CryptoKickers being an example.

Metaplex's default storage destination is Arweave, an obvious choice when auctioning highly valuable assets. So when the JPEG hype spread to Solana, it also affected Arweave.

By this time Arweave had become Beeple and Jay-Z's first NFT storage tier of choice, and people were already aware of it.

One feature often required by NFT developers is a way to batch upload assets with their respective metadata and capture the resulting urls. Metaplex's Candy Machine (command-line tool) can easily complete tasks with a few commands and provides a Solana-compatible NFT smart contract that can be auctioned.

The simplicity of this approach has led projects such as Solana Monkey Business to use Arweave as an intelligent default.

As the primary way to launch the NFT project on Solana, we can be sure of one thing: the more applications Solana sees in the NFT space, the more applications Arweave will get.

Since the release of the Metaplex Candy Machine, the entire ecosystem has made leaps and bounds in using native tools to bulk upload NFT assets to Arweave. This gives projects the freedom to choose which end chain they want to use to start and trade their NFT.

Josh Benaron's ArBundles document, released today, shows how easy it is to send packets to Arweave and retrieve transaction ids for each asset. It can also use arKB to enable binding.