Solana turned some heads when it presented Saga, the first dedicated Web3 smartphone. It looks like the Solana Foundation is pushing for more than just equipping the community with a new smartphone. Non-fungible tokens are still at the forefront of the Web3 revolution that is not only taking place in crypto. Real-world items and industries could also benefit from the new technology and we have seen a couple of successful projects in the past.

What is the NFT Showdown and what holds the future for Solana?

NFT Showdown

The Solana Foundation is hosting a contest to promote and facilitate the development of NFT projects. Contestants can submit their projects until early June and their projects should preferably involve NFTs in fashion, entertainment, gaming, or other industries.

While trading and collecting NFTs have been the biggest viable use case so far, others such as ticketing have been already tested. It seems that Solana would like to see a push forward for all these real-world use cases where technology meets a product that is otherwise not connected to the blockchain. Of course, this would also fit in nicely with

The Foundation will select and support 10 winners on their mission to achieve long-term success in the crypto industry. This will include expert advice from industry leaders and access to their networks.

Solana is facing competition

Solana is facing a lot of competition. Not only from Avalanche but also from SUI which just launched recently. It can handle up to 300,000 transactions per second and this is exactly the nice that Solana has been occupying for a while.

The development of a high-speed blockchain that taps into the real world and offers decentralized apps for everyday use, isn’t an easy task. Solana had to fight with outages of its blockchain several times and only a complete restart helped in each case.

This leaves a lot of room for competitors and it might become highly important for to Solana push its ecosystem as fast and as wide as it can. Ethereum has proven that the network effect is huge. Even with higher fees and a slower speed, Ethereum is still the number 1 smart contract platform. While critics focus on Solana’s hiccups, it might be even more important to foster relationships to gain an edge in a fast-developing environment with the ever-growing competition.