Nifty News: Samurai NFTs take flight with Japan Airlines, Solana slows down

Japan Airlines is creating an NFT project that includes benefits like becoming a member of a samurai family and staying in a traditional mansion.

Japan Airlines NFTs can turn you into a samurai 

Air transport group Japan Airlines dips its toes into nonfungible tokens (NFTs) through a collaboration with marketing firm Hakuhodo on a project called Kokyo NFT. 

On Feb. 5, the airline service announced it would continue collaborating with Hakuhodo to facilitate a second round of experiments within the Kokyo NFT project, following its initial testing phase earlier in February.

The collaboration aims to tokenize local experiences and real-world assets (RWAs) into NFTs. The firms have also continued their discussions on how to build a “value creation story” that would lead inbound and domestic visitors to enjoy local experiences.

Amazing news!! Japan Airlines (JAL) issues NFT on Astar zkEVM

The utilities are one of the best ever. NFT holders
get exclusive experiences not commonly found through regular tourism guides. See more fromhttps://t.co/oZt4jJ9Avs

— Sota Watanabe (@WatanabeSota) February 5, 2024

The project’s website also highlights that it aims to help holders “develop deeper connections with local communities.” This includes being a member of a samurai family while staying at a traditional samurai mansion and immersing in samurai culture and traditions.

NFTs outperformed Ether in January

Meanwhile, NFT indexes show that the digital collectibles space outperformed the gains of Ethereum in January, the top blockchain for NFTs in terms of all-time volume.

On-chain insights platform Nansen’s NFT-500 index showed a 9.35% gain by the index from Jan. 1 to Jan. 31. The analytics platform’s Blue Chip NFT index also showed similar gains of 9.76%.

Ether (ETH) went from $2,238 at the start of January to $2,291 at the end of the month, according to data from Cointelegraph. This marks a 2.3% gain for the crypto asset throughout the entire month.

Related: GoDaddy to charge $0 for ENS .eth name pairing

Blue chip Solana NFTs slow down

In 2023, the Solana network surpassed the Ronin blockchain in all-time NFT sales volume, taking the second stop in the top NFT blockchains by platform. This put Solana second only to Ethereum when it comes to overall NFT sales.

The network continued to compete with Ethereum and Bitcoin in NFT sales volume, fueled by blue chip NFT collections like the DeGods and Tensorians. However, data suggests that blue chip Solana NFTs have been on a slow decline since December.

Solana NFT data tracker SolanaFloor shows that its Blue Chip Solana index peaked on Dec. 26, 2023, and has been on a steady decline since. Meanwhile, the total floor value and volume of blue chip NFTs on Solana showed a similar downward trend.

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Solana NFTs aren’t alone. As previously covered by Cointelegraph, Bitcoin Ordinals also declined in terms of sales volume in January. Ordinals 30-day sales dropped from $868 million in December 2023 to $335 million in January. NFT book author Anndy Lian believes that the oversaturation of the NFT market may have caused the decline.