Top NFT Blockchains in a Nutshell: The First-time Trader’s Guide to Minting Digital Assets

From crypto market jargon to marketplaces that you need to familiarise yourself with, the evolution of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) can be pretty complex.

The futuristic metaverse world of NFTs comprises rare and digital collectibles including paintings, game items, memorabilia, tweets, music, and more! NFT blockchains are where these items exist and are distributed through different processes, creating opportunities for easier trading, exchanging, and sharing of digital assets.

As NFTs are in full swing and the industry abuzz, the introduction of blockchains helps buyers to purchase digital collections amidst the congested environment swirling around their network. These blockchains may vary or correlate with different factors such as immutability, dependability, transparency, and decentralisation.

In this article, we'll take a look at a few of the most widely used NFT blockchains.

Ethereum

Ethereum (ETH) is considered the “leader” when it comes to NFT blockchains, with its skyrocketing exchange rate value of $1,187.57 per one ETH to U.S. dollars, as of writing. However, the transaction cost and gas fee on this blockchain is significantly higher among others.

If you’re planning to buy Ether (Ethereum’s cryptocurrency) with fiat currency, you may purchase it from a cryptocurrency exchange like Coinbase or Kraken. The average minting cost on Ethereum is 0.03 ETH.

Powered by smart contracts, Ethereum designed an extremely secure network and data architecture due to the high volume of NFT projects running on its market.

You can easily verify ownership on Ethereum-based NFTs because the transaction history and token metadata are publicly available and share a similar “backend.” This means that buying and selling Ethereum-based NFTs are portable, even on multiple NFT products with a transaction speed of 13 to 15 seconds.

Some of the leading Ethereum-based NFT marketplaces are Rarible, OpenSea, and Nifty Gateway. According to Amazon Web Services, CryptoKitties is the first-ever NFT project on Ethereum, featuring digital cat collectibles. At present, CryptoKitties has more than 100,000 owners and around 71,000 volumes traded.

Ethereum-based NFTs showed a significant upward momentum with over US$54 billion trading volume in the past year, according to a report on April 17, 2022

Cardano

Cardano blockchain uses ADA as its native cryptocurrency, named after the English mathematician and first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace. Cardano NFT, or simply CNFT, drops its collections via social media networks such as Twitter and Discord. This NFT blockchain was founded in 2015 by Charles Hoskinson, the co-founder of Ethereum. Even though this is a relatively new blockchain in the NFT industry, it is being developed by a team that is already working on the next two generations of blockchain technology.

Cardano is open-source, decentralised, and flexible in “implementing smart contracts, developing decentralized finance apps, new cryptocurrencies, games, and non-fungible tokens, among other things.”

Some of the most popular and recommended marketplaces supported by Cardano are CNFT.io, Tokhun.io, Jpg.store, CardaHub, NFTJam, and Genesis House, among others.

Solana

Undeniably, the most popular NFTs can be found on the Ethereum blockchain but Solana-based NFT collections are catching up to Ethereum and continue to gain popularity among traders.

Solana (SOL) is a public and open source blockchain, which means it can host different “scalable decentralized applications (dApps)” and has smart contracts just like Ethereum. Most NFT traders migrated to Solana due to its lower transaction costs, reaching US$ 1 billion in sales volume in January 2022.

Moreover, one of the major advantages of Solana versus Ethereum is its blockchain clocks’ block time is 0.4 seconds with a block size that can carry 20,000 transactions, whereas Ethereum’s block time reaches 13 seconds and a block size of 70 transactions in a single operation. Gas fees in Solana only cost US$0.00025 per transaction.

The birth of other NFT blockchains like Solana allows traders to pay more affordable fees and deal with lesser congestion, especially during NFT collection drops.

Some of the highly popular marketplaces that support Solana-based NFTs are SolSea, Solanart, and DigitalEyes. To purchase Sol, you need to open a Solana-based wallet including SolFare, Phantom, and Sollet.

One of its most popular NFT projects is the Degenerate Ape Academy with about 10,000 apes and had its highest sale for a single ape worth US$1.1 million in September 2021.