The average monthly trading volumes of NFTs jumped from $64 million in the first half of 2021 to more than $750 million in the second half. Now the NFT space is a $41 billion industry with thousands being traded on a daily basis.
What Is An NFT?
An NFT is a non-fungible token stored on a blockchain. A token in crypto terms, discusses to an asset. “Non-fungible” means unique. Where a fungible token — like Bitcoin — is non-unique, an NFT can only be assigned to a single owner at any one time. Any one Bitcoin equals any one other Bitcoin. But there’s only one NFT. It’s irreplaceable.
The internet makes information abundant. The cost of replicating a digital asset, like an image file, text document or PDF is effectively zero and NFTs introduce scarcity to digital assets.
With NFTs, and the Block Chain we can now see who owns what. No matter how many copies are created, anyone can check who holds the original. From the initial creation of the NFT to every transfer of ownership thereafter, the blockchain stores this information and it can’t be tampered with.
What Are NFTs Used For?
The most common use of NFT technology, right now, is art. Artists are tokenising 1 of 1 pieces and teams are building profile picture projects at great pace.
Bored Ape is unique and programmatically generated NFT
Outside of using these as digital avatars, the NFTs also serve another purpose.
EX: Each BAYC NFT holder gains lifetime membership to a secret apes-only club. One of the more famous Bored Ape owners is the NFT star Stephen Curry, who paid $180,000 for a tweed-wearing Bored Ape NFT
What is the Need for Ethereum Layer 2 Solutions?
The increasing number of transactions and users on Ethereum is responsible for increasing the load on the network and the cost of using the network increases prominently with more and more users competing with each other for adding transactions to the Ethereum network, which are generally termed as “Gas Wars”.
Most recent “Otherside Deeds” Virtual Lands NFT minting by YUGA Labs, Gas prices on Ethereum network went up to 10 Eth (approx. 20,000 USD during the time of writing this article) and some transactions were cancelled automatically due to network congestion and resulting in loss of those funds.
So, Ethereum layer 2 scaling solutions (Optimism) are considered vital instruments for addressing the problems with network performance. Many solutions for Ethereum scaling are undergoing research, testing, and implementation with different approaches for achieving scalability.
The primary purposes of scalability for the Ethereum network to advance in transaction speed together with transaction quantities. At the same time, the scaling solutions should not negotiate the security or decentralization of the Ethereum network. Ethereum also experiences the concerns of irrational gas prices and very slower transactions on the layer 1 blockchain. As of now, Ethereum has two distinct options in the form of sharding and layer 2 solutions for addressing the problems of scalability, high transaction fees, and delays in transaction settlement.
What is
Optimism** is a type of layer-two (L2) scaling technology. It supports Ethereum smart contracts and dev tooling and offers extremely cheap and rapid transactions. These realities make Optimism very friendly for dapps, like NFT and DeFi projects.**
NFT’s on Layer-2
Many NFT Market places and projects are developed on Optimism and details of few of them are below. Do not forget to add Optimism network to your Metamask wallet, Many articles available on medium.
After adding Optimism Network, bridge ETH to Optimism with Optimism ridge or other available bridges as mentioned in the official site
Optimism NFT Marketplace
The best active NFT market places in terms of volume are stated below
1. Quixotic.io
2. Optimarket.io
3. Tofunft.com
Largest Ethereum Mainnet NFTs is available on Optimism:
1. CryptoPunks
2. Doodles
3. Meebits
4. World of Women
5. Cool Cats
6. Chromie Squiggle
7. CrypToadz
The Optimism NFT surge
As you can imagine, the news of OP and further rounds of airdrops has led to a burst of activity on Optimism. According to L2BEAT, the total value locked (TVL) on Optimism surged by +16% over the past week.
As Mirror’s Optimism integration showed that NFT projects can offer very friendly User interface by embracing Optimism. The buzz around this EVM-equivalent L2 increases and as NFT users continue to seek more inexpensive solutions, I expect growing audience for popular L1 NFT projects to add support for Optimism.