Metaplex January Round-up

Highlights

- All-time high of 74.6 million compressed NFTs minted, a 382% increase month-over-month

- 57 million transactions signed, the highest month on-record and a 51% increase month-over-month

- 12.6 million new wallets collected an NFT created through Metaplex, the largest monthly increase of all-time and a 77% increase month-over-month.

- 497k monthly unique signers, the second highest month of all-time

- Metaplex announced three new ecosystem initiatives including cHack, the Metaplex Startup Program, and a sponsored week at MtnDAO

Protocol Activity

In January, NFT mint activity exploded with creators and developers minting 76 million NFTs through Metaplex, including 74.6 million compressed NFTs, the highest monthly total ever and a 382% increase month-over-month. There were 1.5 million Token Metadata NFTs minted, the second highest monthly figure over the last twelve months.

Secondary trading of Solana NFTs created with Metaplex exceeded $226 million in January, the second highest total since January 2022.

497k unique wallets directly signed transactions with the protocol in January, the second highest month of all-time. 

There were over 57 million unique transactions signed this month, an all-time high and a 51% increase month-over-month.

In January, Metaplex was the third largest Solana protocol based on active wallets and the second largest protocol based on transactions. 

As of January, the total number of Metaplex collectors reached 29.0 million unique wallets, an increase of ~12.6 million wallets month-over-month, the largest monthly increase of all-time and a 77% increase month-over-month.

Developer Platform

Inscriptions

Metaplex released Inscriptions, a new standard for fully on-chain digital assets on Solana. Almost 100,000 inscriptions have been minted within the first few weeks including collections by Zen0, Kalif, and more. The program saw widespread adoption across the ecosystem including day 1 support from partners like Tensor, Sniper, and Mallow.

The ecosystem continues to develop new tooling to support the program ahead of the release of the Engraver, a separate Metaplex program that can be combined with Inscriptions to create fully immutable, on-chain assets. 

Updating Compressed NFTs 

Update Metadata for compressed NFTs was shipped to mainnet following RPC integration. 

This includes upgrades to Metaplex’s Bubblegum program and Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API, which is the reference implementation indexer and the API spec for interacting with digital assets on Solana.

MIP 7 (Non-custodial editions)

Token Metadata has been deployed to devnet with the changes for MIP-7, enabling non-custodial edition printing through Print Delegates. 

This feature will allow creators to list their editions for sale on multiple marketplaces concurrently, eliminating the need for creators to choose a single marketplace.

Digital Asset Standard (DAS) API

DAS API, which was developed by Metaplex to provide performant access to digital asset data on Solana, was updated to use the Token Metadata and Bubblegum Rust clients, which will help with dependency management, allowing RPCs to more easily update Solana packages used in their implementations.

Triton and Helius also contributed a handful of improvements this month as DAS remains one of the most significant multi-team collaborations across the Solana ecosystem. 

Additionally QuickNode, one of the largest RPC providers across multiple ecosystems, announced DAS support, marking another step forward towards decentralizing the read layer for digital assets on Solana.

Community 

Metaplex cHack

Metaplex is powering developers to build the next generation of use cases and business on Solana using Compressed NFTs. Throughout February, teams will compete in cHack, a compression-focused hackathon, to build breakthrough applications and tools using Metaplex’s Bubblegum program and DAS API.

The judges for the Developer Tooling, Social, and Mobile tracks for cHack have been announced! 

Armani Ferrante from Backpack, Noah Prince from Helium Foundation, and Nick Frostbutter from Solana Foundation will be reviewing the next generation of compression-focused developer tools on Solana. 

Vibhu from DRiP , Viksit from Solarplex, and Ilmoi from Tensor will join cHack to judge the Social track!

And Drewy from DRiP, Mike Sulistio from Solana Mobile and Arturo Jamaica will be judging the Mobile track. 

Metaplex Start-up Program

Discover the Metaplex Startup Program—your key to success building with NFTs on Solana! Gain access to essential resources, $MPLX grants, and expert guidance, accelerating your journey from concept to market. Connect with industry leaders for valuable insights and direct support from seasoned founders. Access to the program is in high demand, with 21 applications already being submitted since the program was announced. Reach us at [email protected]

Metaplex Week at MtnDAO

Metaplex will be sponsoring a compression-focused week at MtnDAO v5, a recurring month-long event that’s become the go-to hub for Solana builders each winter. Whether you’re building for cHack or just want to find other builders to collaborate with in-person, MtnDAO is the place to be. Metaplex will be hosting workshops throughout the week of February 12th and will be capping it off with a sponsored ski-day on Friday the 16th.

Application Ecosystem

The ecosystem of applications and services built on Metaplex continues to expand with a variety of new use cases testing and discovering product market fit.

• Magic Eden had a busy January, shipping a new rewards program and releasing their cross-chain Magic Eden Wallet, designed to target NFT users across all chains. The new wallet even supports in-app minting, including new open edition releases from Degenerate Ape Academy, Claynosaurz, and BoDoggos. Magic Eden also announced they will be open sourcing and contributing some of their protocols to Non-Fungible DAO, which will be powered by a new token $NFT.

• On January 27th Phantom, the most popular wallet amongst Solana NFT users, surpassed Coinbase in global app downloads, highlighting Solana’s surge in popularity and the demand for NFTs.

• Tensor introduced a new Price Lock feature, which enables users to easily “long” or “short” NFTs. In just the first 12 hours this feature produced 10,000 $SOL in volume and a 100,000 $SOL TVL by the end of the first week. 

• Famous Fox Federation expanded its product suite to include Fortuna, a collection of on-chain games. Famous Fox’s wide range of products is demonstrating product market fit, generating ~$50k of revenue over the last seven days.

• Metaboss, a popular Solana NFT developer tool built by Metafrost, added new commands that use the DAS API instead of gPA calls, making it significantly faster to take snapshots for normal sized NFT collections. 

• Solana Mobile’s Chapter 2 announcement this month saw 40,000 preorders after the Saga device sold out mid-December 2023. Saga Genesis Token holders have already received NFT airdrops from creators across the Solana ecosystem powered by Metaplex and Underdog Protocol.

• Sujiko, a popular NFT perps DEX developed by SolWorks and Zhe, is part of a suite of tools designed to enhance the Solana ecosystem. They recently launched the Sujiko Warrior’s NFT collection on Tensor's launchpad, offering holders exclusive access to the Sujiko protocol, along with other benefits like early access to future projects.‍

• Cointool, a multi-chain developer toolkit, released new tools for snapshotting Solana NFT holders, providing developers with another option for building with Solana NFTs.

Creator Ecosystem 

Solana creators are discovering new ways to build-on chain communities and attract audiences through NFTs. Some highlights include:

• BOOGLE, one of the most popular and exclusive PFP collections on Solana, saw BOOGLEs #083, #092 and #015 sell OTC for a combined 7,665 SOL. At the time of trading, the sales equated to about $750,000! 

• Roope Rainisto, a widely respected artist from Helsinki, Finland, successfully sold out his first Solana NFT collection, dubbed SMILE. Roope’s artwork has stacked up over 2,434 ETH of volume on Opensea since Feb 2023 and has produced popular collections such as Life in West America. It’s worth watching whether more ETH creators follow in his footsteps!

• RGB announced Myths of Brume, a card game utilizing compressed NFTs, powered by Metaplex’s Bubblegum program. Mystery packs, collecting & trading cards, creating the best decks, playing vs friends, tournaments and more coming to you on-chain.

• The Heist announced Season 3 and partnered with Kamino Finance, launching a $NANA/$SOL Vault. Users can earn fees, rewards, and Kamino Points.

• Billionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson launched a Solana NFT airdrop with Drip Haus and Degen Poet.

• Saga Monkes evolved into one of the most popular collections on Solana after airdropping 8505 compressed NFTs to the wallets that claimed Solana Mobile Genesis Tokens. This marks the first major PFP collection on Solana that was distributed to Saga Mobile users.

• MonkeDAO, Solana’s first NFT DAO, is restructuring their governance model. As part of the current restructuring, they’re working to give Gen3 community members a stronger voice in how the DAO operates and also changing the composition of the board and executives.

• The Whales Music released its second single “Hunned Racks” ft. Made in Tokyo and yung gra$$hopper, out now on Def Jam Records. It includes a digital vinyl mint that’s redeemable for a physical record.

For on-going community updates, please follow @metaplex on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). For developers, we recommend following and turning on notifications for @metaplexstatus. To contribute to the Metaplex protocol, please engage with us on Github or consider submitting a Metaplex Improvement Proposal (MIP) at mip.metaplex.com.

Lastly, a thank you to TopLedger for their data support on this month’s round-up and providing real-time monitoring on Metaplex activity and usage to the ecosystem. For additional Metaplex on-chain metrics, please refer to the following link.