After months of speculation that DeGods and Y00ts, two of the top Solana non-fungible token (NFT) projects, would be leaving the SOL ecosystem, the team behind the projects confirmed the migration on Twitter on Sunday.
DeGods will be moving to Ethereum and Y00ts will be moving to Polygon in early Q1, the team said.
“There’s an argument to be made that [DeGods] has capped out on Solana,” the project’s leader Rohun Vora, known as Frank, said in a Monday Twitter Spaces. “It’s hard to accept, but it’s been tough to grow at the rate we want to grow. If Ethereum is where we have to go to keep growing, it’s what we have to do.”
The collections are two of the buzziest in the Solana NFT market, with DeGods commanding a 515 SOL (around $5,750) floor price at the time of writing, the largest in the ecosystem. Y00ts, DeGod’s sister PFP collection that was released this fall, has a 148 SOL (around $1,660) floor.
Sales of DeGods rose following the news, with the collection’s floor price increasing 12% as of Monday. Sales for Y00ts have stayed relatively calm, with the floor increasing just 5 SOL (around $55). In the week leading up to the announcement, sales of DeGods and Y00ts accounted for nearly 70% of all Solana NFT sale volume, according to data from Magic Eden.
The move was preceded by months of tension on NFT Twitter, with some builders in the Solana NFT space condemning the exit while the collection’s holders largely cheered on the move.
In early December at the Art Basel festival in Miami, rumors circulated on Twitter that the DeGods team asked the Solana Foundation for $5 million to stay on SOL. A representative from the Solana Foundation confirmed the figure to CoinDesk, though the DeGods team declined to comment on the request’s validity.
Another win for Polygon
Y00ts’ move to Polygon came at a price. A DeGods representative told CoinDesk that Polygon paid for the move with a grant from its partnership fund, and the details of the deal will be made public eventually.
Vora said the grant will last “one year, maybe two,” and was not paid up front. It’s unclear what will happen once the grant runs out.
“There are a lot of milestones we have to hit,” Vora said. “And the grant isn’t as much as people think.”
The migration is the latest in Polygon’s partnership winning streak – the layer 2 blockchain has attracted partners as large as Starbucks, Nike, Reddit, Instagram and DraftKings in the past year.
On the backend, DeGod’s move to Ethereum and Polygon could get complicated. It’s rare to see high-profile NFT bridges at this scale – when projects go multi-chain, it’s typically instead in the style of Doodles, who are considering launching Doodles 2 on a layer 2 blockchain while keeping its original collection on Ethereum.
The details of the migration’s technical elements have not yet been announced, but the team has said that Y00tpoints, a token given to Y00ts holders who stake their NFTs, will transfer chains as well.
“What is the worst case scenario here? An exploit on the bridge contract,” Vora said of the move's technical challenges. “We want to do [the migration] as soon as possible, shooting for Q1, but we have to make sure it’s airtight. Bridges are notorious for issues around stuff like this.”
