The original post was on Figment’s Blog*

DataHub provides direct access to RPC infrastructure & open APIs to help developers build, launch, and scale web3 apps without the need to manage complex infrastructure. We are excited to announce that DataHub is powering Solanart, the first fully-fledged decentralized NFT marketplace on the Solana blockchain. Sign up for DataHub and start building your web3 solution today.

Solanart's Story

In the world of cryptocurrency the summer of 2021 was branded “the summer of Solana” in response to Solana’s projected meteroric rise to compete with industry leaders such as Ethereum. The technology Solana created was the impetus for these sunny projections, with the ability to handle over 65,000 transactions at the fraction of the cost of it’s competitors, the hype was well earned. In July of 2021 the Solanart founding team began developing a trustless NFT marketplace on Solana to provide artists the opportunity to promote and sell their art. While Solana’s technology is able to compute tens of thousands of transactions per second, the public nodes are rate limited to around 100 requests every ten seconds. After launching their marketplace in July, Solanart discovered they needed a way to process thousands of transactions per second. Solanart evaluated other providers but elected to use DataHub as the command center of choice -- powering their marketplace with increased throughput and thus improving the customer experience. With DataHub, developers can access popular web3 tools through our RPC and enterprise-grade infrastructure.\

Solanart Overview

Solanart was created to bring the cutting-edge technology Solana pioneered to the NFT platform and dreams of becoming the largest decentralized NFT marketplace in the industry, starting with Solana. Using DataHub’s node infrastructure, Solanart’s developers connected to Solana’s RPC and Websockets to help scale their marketplace. For example, in Solanart’s first month on the platform, DataHub powered the connection and throughput for over 949M RPC calls to Solana. According to DappRadar, Solanart is on pace to reaching its ambitious goals, with over $600M in trading volume and average NFT sales of $1.15K, it is the largest NFT Marketplace on Solana.

Solanart Collections

Although relatively new, Solanart has a diverse portfolio of NFTs available to purchase. Its most popular, Degenerate Ape Academy sold out of 10,000 apes in 8 minutes, leaving a lot of degens angry without an ape. To ensure a quality experience for both artists and collectors, they created a vetting process before NFT drops. All interested artists have to “apply” to launch a collection, which has anxious artists tweeting.\

Solanart’s platform arms artists with a vehicle to launch and promote NFTs and provides a comprehensive trading overview for each collector. Creating the best marketplace for NFT’s in and of itself is a worthy accomplishment but in Solanart’s case it is creating dual benefits. With the creation of quality NFT’s on Solanart more people are motivated to buy and use SOL tokens. As the Degenerate Apes showed, the demand for quality creative NFT’s is nearly inexhaustible at the moment. If you are looking to purchase or list your first NFT Solanart has you covered. Explore their collections and opportunities to own Degenerate Trash Pandas and more.  \

“*We have seen the Solana ecosystem explode since September, and Solanart has definitely been a driving force behind the chain’s activity. We are proud to be powering one of the top NFT marketplaces in the industry.” *- Yannick Folla, Head of DataHub @ Figment

Why Build on Solana?

Solana has become one of the fastest-growing ecosystems in web3 with over 400 projects since its mainnet launch at the end of 2020. Solana’s mission was to create an alternative to Ethereum by offering developers low gas fees, scalability, and security. Solana is a Layer 1 censorship-resistant blockchain, ensuring applications on their network can operate freely without transaction interruptions. \

The seven key innovations that make the Solana network possible:\

• Proof of History (POH) — a clock before consensus;
• Tower BFT — a PoH-optimized version of PBFT;
• Turbine — a block propagation protocol;
• Gulf Stream — Mempool-less transaction forwarding protocol;
• Sealevel — Parallel smart contracts run-time;
• Pipelining — a Transaction Processing Unit for validation optimization
• Cloudbreak — Horizontally-Scaled Accounts Database; and
• Archivers — Distributed ledger storage

**Click here to explore projects in the Solana ecosystem.  **

While Solana utilizes many innovative ideas in their approach to blockchain technology, Proof-of-History (PoH) stands out. Before Proof-of-History, the global time and order of transactions had to be agreed upon for each block which can be complicated and would significantly slow processing speed. Since Solana uses Proof-of-History (PoH) it creates a trustless agreement of time and automated order of messages, enabling developers the speed to process over 65,000 transactions per second. \

Why Solanart Chose DataHub?

"Solanart's success story would not be possible without the support from our loyal partners, including DataHub who helped us scale at a critical time when we first started experiencing insane growth! Thank you guys for the support!" - Solanart Founders

In a perfect world, Solana’s technological advancements would be enough to ensure every project is a success. In crypto unfortunately, there are so many factors in a company’s success or failure that have nothing to do with transaction speeds or gas fees. This is where partnerships can be very beneficial. DataHub is the easiest way for developers to build, launch, and scale new web3 applications. DataHub developers can connect to multiple blockchain’s powerful and unique features without becoming protocol experts or managing complex infrastructure. More than anything, at DataHub, we allow companies to focus on what they do best because with us, they don’t need to worry about anything else—looking to cut development costs and time? Don’t wait; sign up for DataHub today.\

DataHub ensures that Solana applications are always connected to the network via our highly available read/write node and enriched API infrastructure. Solana DataHub Offers:

• Gateway Access - RPC Websocket access
• High availability access to network APIs backed by redundant infrastructure
• Ability to read on-chain data and submit transactions
• Easy integration
• High-quality support
• Low maintenance
• Enterprise-grade infrastructure\

For developers interested to learn more about web3 and building applications on Solana, Figment Learn is a great place to start. Explore Solana’s innovation without jargon with community-sourced tutorials and 101 protocol pathways at learn.figment.io

**Helpful Resources **

• Solanart Website
• Solanart Twitter
• Solanart FAQ
• Solanart Artist Application Form 
• Solanart Discord
• Solana DataHub
• Solana on Figment Learn
• Explaining Solana with The Simpsons
• Figment Discord 

About Figment

Figment’s purpose is to build a better Internet by increasing usage of the next generation of Proof of Stake blockchains.These efficient blockchains give people greater control of their data, more privacy, and increase financial inclusion. By eliminating intermediaries they also limit the power of centralized data monopolies, rent-seeking financial institutions and anti-social algorithms.

We bring our mission to reality by helping investors stake their tokens; earn yield and participate in securing the blockchain. Our Hubble and Prime applications as well as our governance expertise, allow token holders to analyze, monitor, and make informed decisions. We build web3 developer communities via our Learn education program and then make it simple for these developers to launch applications and manage smart contracts via our DataHub platform. And finally, by building and operating The Graph based indexers, we enable the efficient search and querying of blockchain data.