Understand Metaplex in Three Minutes: A Decentralized Infrastructure Platform Based on Solana

Metaplex supports the minting of various digital assets, including NFTs, FAs, RWAs, game assets, and DePIN assets, having minted over 550 million assets across 55 million unique addresses, making it one of the most widely used blockchain protocols and developer platforms today.

Written by: Sistine Research

Overview

The Metaplex Protocol is a decentralized platform built on the Solana blockchain that provides developers with the tools and standards to create decentralized applications, thereby simplifying the creation, sale, and management of digital assets.

Metaplex supports the minting of various digital assets, including NFTs, FAs, RWAs, game assets, and DePIN assets, having minted over 550 million assets across 55 million unique addresses, making it one of the most widely used blockchain protocols and developer platforms today.

Metaplex Protocol Structure

Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)

Metaplex is built on the Solana Virtual Machine (SVM), a smart contract execution environment. SVM allows developers to write and deploy smart contracts in a secure and decentralized manner.

Metaplex Developer Platform

The Metaplex developer platform provides a range of developer tools, including SDKs, CLIs, guides, and tutorials, offering code frameworks, guidelines, and documentation references for contract deployment on SVM.

Metaplex Contract Library

Metaplex provides developers with a ready-to-use and audited contract library, allowing development teams to pay for and use the Metaplex contract library directly, reducing time and development costs.

Bubblegum

Bubblegum is a program for creating and interacting with compressed NFTs (cNFTs) on Solana. Bubblegum can reduce the cost of storing NFTs on the Solana chain, which is beneficial for use cases like full-chain games that may involve storing and interacting with hundreds of thousands of NFTs. cNFTs can help reduce costs and provide benefits.

If every image on Instagram were an NFT on Solana without cNFTs, the storage cost would grow linearly, reaching 12,000,000 SOL for one billion NFTs. However, with Metaplex's Bubblegum cNFT, the storage cost for one billion NFTs would drop to 500 SOL.

Core

Core is a cost-effective NFT standard on Solana that offers developers lower minting costs, reduced computational load (allowing more transactions per block), and enforceable royalties compared to other NFT standards.

MPL-Hybrid

MPL-Hybrid (MPL-404) enables the interchangeability between NFTs and FTs, gaining more recognition with the launch of the $DEGOD token by DeGods. Users can swap DeGods NFTs for a certain amount of $DEGOD tokens using MPL-Hybrid.

Inscription

The Metaplex inscription program allows developers to write data directly to Solana, using the blockchain as a data storage method, similar to inscribing serial numbers directly on the Bitcoin blockchain. This allows small digital art collectibles to have their metadata inscribed on Solana and stored by paying an additional fee.

Token Validation Rules

Token validation rules define a set of rules for the creation and updating of SPL tokens, and any token transactions that violate these rules will be revoked.

Token Metadata

Token metadata is an NFT standard on Solana that allows developers to create digital assets directly by adding metadata to tokens. Currently, the vast majority of pfp NFT collections on Solana use this standard.

Fusion

Allows builders to create composable NFTs, such as combining seven NFT fragments into a complete item in a chain game, or purchasing ten digital collectibles from an artist and freely combining them into a new artwork.

Hydra

Creates shared wallets, providing a direct funding pathway for large-scale events through central wallet allocation.

Candy Machine

A program on Solana for minting and distributing NFTs.

Summary of Metaplex Contract Library

Metaplex is responsible for developing most of the developer tools on Solana. For projects or developers, using Metaplex tools directly saves a lot of time and costs compared to building programs from scratch using audited contracts on Solana. Most of these tools charge a small usage fee, and 50% of Metaplex's revenue will be used to repurchase $MPLX tokens.

Aura Network

Metaplex recently launched Aura Network, a data availability layer for Solana, which not only creates a new value proposition for the MPLX token but also enhances Solana's scalability, constrained by the speed of reading and displaying blockchain data.

Decentralized applications often face issues such as high costs and low speeds, making it difficult to compete with centralized applications. Aura compensates for SVM and MPL data availability through a node-based decentralized network, efficiently indexing asset data for Aura and providing real-time data availability guarantees for compressed states. MPLX has now become the incentive token for running Aura nodes and the gas target for Aura Network.

Metaplex DAO

Metaplex DAO is responsible for the governance of the Metaplex Protocol and manages the MPLX treasury used for Metaplex development.

MPLX holders can participate in Metaplex community governance by submitting MIPs (Metaplex Improvement Proposals), grant proposals, voting, and more.

MPLX Token

50% of Metaplex's revenue will be used to purchase MPLX for the Metaplex DAO treasury.

After the launch of Aura Network, MPLX can also be compared with other data availability solution tokens.

Sistine Research: MPLX is Undervalued

Sistine Research believes that the MPLX token may be undervalued by 3-10 times for the following reasons:

MPLX lacks structural supply, leading to limited supply. Even if Aura Network nodes receive MPLX token rewards, they are subsidized by a closed-loop system (Metaplex revenue) rather than token releases.
Demand-side traffic comes from MPLX buybacks. Since Metaplex revenue is priced in SOL, MPLX is a high Beta asset on SOL, with significant demand (similar to tokens like WIF, POPCAT, JUP, etc.).
The current trading price of MPLX is far lower than the valuation of similar DA solutions' FDV. While Solana is currently seeking aggressive market share expansion, Metaplex's focus on Solana without integrating other mainstream networks may be one reason for its lower valuation. Similarly, the high valuation of other solutions stems from providing DA solutions for multiple blockchains; for example, Celestia's data availability for only the Mina Protocol does not yield significant price gains for TIA, but providing solutions for multiple networks may lead to token price increases.
Metaplex's core revenue model (tokenization of Solana network tools) may continue to expand with the enrichment of the tool library.
Currently, MPLX can only be traded on exchanges like Bybit, Gate, and Kucoin, and perpetual contracts have not yet been opened. Listing on other major exchanges and opening contracts can be seen as a bullish signal.

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。