• According to the report, DeGods would be moving to Ethereum while Polygon also welcomes y00ts with open arms.

• Y00ts recently recorded 1.7M SOL in total volume while DeGods also got almost 2.2 million SOL.

The struggle of Solana continues as two top Non-Fungible Token collections, DeGods and y00ts have announced their departure from the ecosystem to a new chain effective next year. According to the report, DeGods would be moving to Ethereum while Polygon also welcomes y00ts with open arms. A user on Reddit has alleged that both DeGods and y00ts demanded millions of dollars to stay on the Solana blockchain. However, the team rejected the request. The user further claims that Polygon heeded the request and paid $5 million to bridge y00ts. The amount Ethereum paid to accommodate DeGods is yet unknown. 

Both collections are found in the top three Solana NFTs by volume on the OpenSea Marketplace. Y00ts recently recorded 1.7M SOL in total volume while DeGods also got almost 2.2 million SOL. Their presence could be heavily missed on the blockchain which is already struggling to retain its spot on the DeFiLlama ranking. On the platform, Solana has 91 protocols with a Total value locked (TVL) of $218.4M, ranking 11th. 

Ethereum and Polygon, which exist as strong Solana competitors, are on the other hand dominating in the top five. Ethereum has 600 protocols with a TVL of $23.38B. This makes it the largest Defi chain. Polygon also has 352 protocols with a TVL of $993.41M. In the decentralized universe, Ethereum controls almost 60 percent of the total value locked. Polygon on the other hand has 2.5 percent domination in space. 

Solana to improve the network with a new validator

Solana has recently been affected by outages with co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko explaining the challenge in a recent podcast. According to him, stalling the network is the biggest challenge and also a priority of developers. This year, outages causing a delay in transactions have happened multiple times and eight times since March 2020. Some of the crashes have been linked to memory overflow, glitches, or power outages. In May, the platform went offline for hours. In June, Solana faced another outage. In October, a validator took the network down. These series of events have contributed to projects migrating from the Solana ecosystem to Polygon and Ethereum which have not faced a single problem with their blockchains so far. 

Solana has assured that it is working on these challenges with its new validator improving the network reliability in 2023. In its 2023 roadmap, Solana explained that Firedancer, a second validator client from Jump Crypto, could improve the network with the NFT industry expected to see a boom in the next stage of consumer brand interaction. 

Firedancer will make Solana the only other blockchain network besides Ethereum to have more than one validator client.