Metaplex March Round-up

Highlights

• 98 million NFTs minted, the second highest monthly total ever 

• 720k monthly unique signers, the highest month of all-time

• 7.5 million new wallets collected an NFT created through Metaplex, the third largest monthly increase of all-time and a 19% increase month-over-month.

• Metaplex released Core, the next-generation standard for NFTs on Solana

• Metaplex Foundation announced that 50% of all Metaplex protocol fees, including historical fees, will be converted into MPLX and contributed to the Metaplex DAO treasury 

Protocol Activity

In March, creators and developers minted 98 million NFTs through Metaplex, including 817k Token Metadata NFTs and 97 million compressed NFTs, the second highest monthly total ever.

Secondary trading of Solana NFTs reached $359 million in March, a 57% increase MoM and the highest monthly total on record, driven in part by the increase in the price of SOL. On a SOL basis, trading volume was up 3% MoM.

720k unique wallets directly signed transactions with the protocol in March, the highest month of all-time.

There were 89 million Token Metadata transactions and 92 million Bubblegum transactions signed across 96 million distinct transactions in the month of March.

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

As of March, the total number of Metaplex collectors reached 47 million unique wallets, an increase of 7.5 million wallets month-over-month, the third largest monthly increase of all-time and a 19% increase month-over-month.

Developer Platform

Core

In March Metaplex introduced Core, a groundbreaking standard for digital assets on Solana. This new standard addresses critical needs for developers, creators, and collectors by streamlining the developer experience and significantly reducing minting costs.

Key to Core’s innovation is a single account model combined with a highly flexible plugin system that enables developers to customize asset behavior and integrate unique functionalities. While other standards inherit the data for an entire fungible token program, Core assets store all key data in a single Solana account, leading to an improved developer experience and lower compute requirements which minimizes network impact.

Expanding on the Metaplex Digital Asset Standard API (DAS API), Core assets will be automatically indexed and available for application developers through a common interface that is used for all Solana NFTs. However, a unique improvement is that with the Core attribute plugin, developers will be able to add on-chain data that is now also automatically indexed.

As part of the release, Metaplex introduced an open source UI for all things Core, allowing users to easily create, transfer or update their Core digital assets. It also includes an explorer for viewing assets. 

Metaplex also released an experimental version of Candy Machine to devnet that’s optimized for Core assets, providing developers with another valuable tool to kickstart projects on the new standard.

Teams from across the ecosystem have raced to integrate Core with Tensor, Phantom, Solflare, Sniper, Extrnode, Triton, Helius, Simplehash, OKX Wallet, Truffle, Mallow, dReader and Underdog all announcing support for the new standard shortly after release. Solana Foundation also endorsed the new standard and blue chip creators such as Claynosaurz, MonkeDAO and DAA have all leveraged Core for recent drops or are planning to near-term. 

Core is now live on Mainnet. As we move forward, we invite all developers to explore the capabilities of Core by visiting Metaplex Core. Here you can mint your own assets, access documentation, and start using Core. 

Community 

Metaplex cHack

This March the Metaplex community celebrated the conclusion of cHack, our hackathon dedicated to advancing compressed NFTs on Solana.

With a total prize pool of 1,000,000 $MPLX on the line, the competition was fierce. Torque took home the Grand Prize, receiving 250,000 $MPLX for their approach to building the decentralized attention economy. Formerly known as Onnyx, Torque enables builders to launch on-chain campaigns effectively, leveraging crypto primitives to enhance distribution.

In Second Place, LightDAS was awarded 100,000 $MPLX. LightDAS offers a lighter version  of Metaplex's DAS API by allowing developers to selectively index specific Merkle Trees, reducing overhead and enhancing data accessibility.

Rounding out the top three, Filtoor won third place with a prize of 50,000 $MPLX. Their project provides an open-source cNFT spam filter, offering both a self-hosted and a hosted API solution, along with a transaction explorer.

cHack also included six specific tracks, each judged independently, with 100,000 $MPLX awarded to each winner:

• Gaming - cBoxes allows cNFT holders to use their NFT-linked PDAs as transferable wallets, opening up new possibilities for character-driven transactions and in-game economies.

• Consumer - MSG.LAND introduces compressed comments, a permissionless network for social posts that allows up to 1kB of compressed data to be posted and verified on-chain at minimal cost.

• Developer Tooling - Torque won this highly competitive track by addressing a crucial challenge for builders: enhancing product distribution within the blockchain space.

• Mobile - Picobot redefines mobile NFT trading with a user-friendly Telegram bot experience.

• RWA - TeleportDomains transforms web2 domains into tradable NFTs, bridging the gap between traditional and digital asset ownership.

• DePin - Shaga’s cloud gaming platform allows gamers to access high-end gaming experiences remotely, addressing gaps in self-custodial web3 gaming technologies.

Congratulations to all our winners and participants and a huge thanks to our judges and partners who helped make this event a success. 

Metaplex DAO

Protocol Fees

In March the Metaplex Foundation announced that 50% of all Metaplex protocol fees, including historical fees, will be converted into MPLX and contributed to the Metaplex DAO treasury to support Metaplex community initiatives and continued adoption of the protocol. More details will be released soon. MPLX is the governance and utility token that serves as the native token for the Metaplex protocol.

MIP-9

This month the Metaplex DAO received and ultimately voted to pass a proposal (MIP-9) from Slorg aimed at strengthening the protocol’s defense against malicious spam cNFTs that could disrupt transactions.

The proposal included changes that limit certain complexities of cNFT configurations, preventing the creation of transaction-breaking cNFTs. This ensures smoother transaction processing and improves compatibility across applications within the ecosystem.

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.

• Render announced a new proposal (RNP-011) that would use compressed NFTs on Solana to store and track metadata associated with the creation of 3D data sets that will power 3D AI models. 

• Phantom wallet surpassed four million monthly active users and achieved a new all-time high, even overtaking Metamask in App Store rankings. 

• Tensor Foundation launched $TNSR, the governance token for Tensor protocols that have powered over $2bn in Solana NFT trading.

• Parallel TCG introduced 'Colony', an AI-powered, on-chain gaming experience that will be built on Solana. The game is expected to include in-game assets and characters that will be minted as Solana NFTs.

• Star Atlas released new details around the future of their expansive in-game universe from now through Season 8, which includes the release of their private combat beta featuring combat racing, 3rd person shooter multiplayer, character progression, and a variety of vehicles, ships, and weapons. Players can expect further customization options, additional modules, real estate mechanics, new careers, and entirely new game modes in upcoming seasons. Also noteworthy was the $5 million sale of the first Star Atlas Titan Ship this month. 

• DeezNuts announced new changes to the Tiny SPL standard, powered by Bubblegum, that enable additional functionality around fractionalization and hybrid DeFi for compressed NFTs.

• BlockGames, a cross-game, cross-chain, decentralized player network designed to accelerate user growth for games integrated Solana into their network, demonstrating the blockchain's growing appeal across gaming platforms.

Creator Ecosystem 

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

• Rho successfully launched their new hybrid standard pSPL20 and sold out their latest collection. Rho differentiates itself from other hybrid DeFi programs by leveraging Metaplex Inscriptions combined with pNFT editions and T22 fungible tokens, all powered by their inhouse launchpad. pSPL20 allows for true fungibility within NFT collections, enabling functionalities like utility and sustainable tokenization.

• Claynosaurz announced their integration with Metaplex Core and revealed their booster pack release at NFT.NYC, a redeemable digital asset and one of the first digital assets on Core.

• MonkeDAO announced their exclusive Core POAPs, only available to mint during one of their NFT.NYC events.

• KZNA announced its pivot to using Metaplex Core for its upcoming mint in Summer 2024.

• Publique, a project by Robbie Shilstone, launched its platform aimed at attracting new audiences to the concept of digital ownership on Solana. Robbie has created animations for notable Web2 clients such as Disney, MoMA, Apple, Volvo, and DoorDash. Are you a rat or a pigeon?

• The NFT collections of Killabears and XPUNKS have extended their user reach by bridging to Solana from Ethereum and Ripple.

For on-going community updates, please follow @metaplex on Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). You can also subscribe to email updates here. 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.