DeGods and Y00ts, two of the most popular nonfungible token digital art collections on the Solana blockchain, announced today that they will be moving to Ethereum and Polygon.

According to the announcement on Twitter, DeGods is first bridging to Ethereum and Y00ts is bridging to the Polygon blockchain. Details of how the migration and the bridge will work are planned for when it is prepared and tested, the creators said, as it “has never been done at this scale.”

Nonfungible tokens, or NFTs, are a type of blockchain-based asset that represent the ownership of digital items such as artwork, digital collectibles, videos, music, or in-game items. NFT owners can show that they own digital assets by holding the private keys to the tokens that represent them, which are transacted on specific blockchains. NFTs can be bought, sold and traded for cryptocurrency and thus they can hold real-world value.

The full migration is planned for the first quarter of 2023. The $DUST utility token for the two collections – used to buy, sell and mint NFTs on the DeGods ecosystem — will also bridge to the new blockchains at that time.

Rohun Vora, the founder of both collections known as Frank III, said in a Twitter Spaces chat that the move was to open the NFT collections to more opportunities and to provide additional space to grow the collections onto additional blockchains.

During the Spaces discussion, Vora commented that Ethereum and Polygon would provide the best way for the collections to reach a broader audience of NFT users. He added that the migration would happen through a cross-chain bridge.

Vora also confirmed on Twitter that the migration itself would be “opt-in” for owners and would not be forced. People can keep their NFTs on Solana should they choose.

The move comes after Solana has suffered a rough year. The blockchain has suffered up to 10 partial or full outages in 2022, along with slowed block times. That included a four-hour outage that occurred in June, a seven-hour outage in May and an outage that lasted two days in January. That’s all coming on the heels of yet another major 18-hour outage in September 2021.

The blockchain was touted as a potential competitor for Ethereum, especially as a place to host NFTs, thanks to low transaction fees. However, with these numerous outages, both Ethereum and Polygon seem to be superior, since neither has suffered major outages, even though Ethereum has faced scaling issues.

Also recently, Solana’s market has been struggling since the collapse and bankruptcy of the crypto exchange FTX. The price of its token fell from $31 in November to $11.33 in December after it was discovered that the Solana Foundation, the organization behind the Solana ecosystem, had invested heavily in FTX, and had large amounts of its cryptocurrency stranded on FTX during the bankruptcy.

As a result, a number of other crypto projects have begun to shy away from Solana or diversify. For example, Magic Eden, originally a Solana-focused NFT marketplace, recently integrated Ethereum and Polygon. Phantom, also a Solana-based crypto wallet, added Ethereum and Polygon support.

In a separate letter published on Twitter, Vora commented that Solana put the two NFT collections on the map and asked the DeGods and Y00ts communities to show kindness and look forward to the future.

“The Solana NFT ecosystem is incredible,” Vora said. “We owe everything to the people here. We are taking a risk by doing this. 2023 is going to be electric.”

Image: Y00ts