Multicoin Capital: Why are we leading the investment in Metaplex?

Author: Shayon Sengupta

Original Title: 《The Composable NFT Standard》

Compiled by: Hu Tao, Chain Catcher

Today, we are excited to announce that Multicoin Capital and Jump Crypto have co-led a $43 million strategic investment in Metaplex, with participation from Solana Ventures, Alameda Research, Samsung Next, Sino Global Capital, Animoca, Cultur3 Capital, Blue Pool, and over 90 other supporters.

Metaplex is a decentralized protocol that, combined with an open-source network framework, helps artists, brands, and creators create NFTs and launch self-hosted storefronts. Metaplex is the primary NFT standard on Solana, powering the vast majority of NFT activity.

Since its launch in June 2021, Metaplex has driven over $12 billion in NFT transaction volume, representing over 5.5 million NFTs, 85,000 projects, and more than 600,000 active collectors. The total market capitalization of the 200 most popular NFT projects on Solana exceeds $1 billion, including Solana Monkey Business, Degenerate Ape Academy, and Shadowy Super Coder DAO. The Metaplex standard and tools have found a massive market, attracting users and beginning to scale—this all happened before the first formal fundraising.

NFTs are rapidly reshaping communities around media, culture, sports, and general internet applications. A large group of influential creators has begun to realize this and has accordingly invested in this round for Metaplex, including Michael Jordan, William Wesley, Allen Iverson, Shari Glazer, RÜFÜS DU SOL, and Cozomo de' Medici. NFT collections built on the Metaplex standard represent some of the world's most important creators, investors, and artists. We attribute this to Metaplex's obsession with out-of-the-box usability, the fundamental cost advantages provided by the Solana blockchain, and the vast design space for on-chain composable assets.

The adoption of NFTs represents a milestone moment in the Web3 adoption cycle. Despite challenges along the way, thousands of lay users are still willing to join the crypto track. Events over the past year mark a mainstream understanding of one of the core principles of cryptocurrency: ownership. The world is beginning to accept decentralized networks as a value proposition for sovereignty, immutability, and censorship resistance.

While many view NFTs as JPEGs with some provenance or ownership guarantees provided by the blockchain, their practical potential far exceeds this notion. NFTs are one of the most flexible data structures in cryptocurrency, with use cases ranging from gaming assets to financial contracts and everything in between. Beyond ownership, a key unlock for Web3 is composability, or the idea that assets in any given environment can be seamlessly transferred to other environments.

To achieve ownership and composability, we need standards that can establish the necessary social consensus. In society, we use laws and regulations to form a collective understanding of property rights and expected behaviors. On the blockchain, this understanding comes from developers building protocols and applications based on standards.

Our argument for Metaplex is simple: As a foundational layer where all value is exchanged in the form of NFTs, Metaplex becomes the standard for developing normative standards and driving their use through modular products and programs.

The Metaplex community continues to develop new issuance and distribution mechanisms in products such as Candy Machine, Auction House, and Gumdrop—each allowing creators to finely control how their collectibles are released. Open-source reference implementations and SDKs enable developers to easily deploy and scale new applications. Over 2,600 development teams have forked the core repository more than 15,000 times across applications like Magic Eden, Fractal, HEIR, Star Atlas, Aurory, and Genopets.

As more assets and applications are deployed on Solana using the Metaplex standard, we will begin to see certain parts of the Metaverse take shape as a large-scale, interoperable world. Imagine in-game assets acquired in Star Atlas being auctioned on Fractal, split using Bridgesplit, and ultimately collectively owned by a DAO rather than a small team. In these worlds, the potential for new forms of interaction and engagement is limitless, all made possible by the standards created by Metaplex.

Solana is the only blockchain that maintains composability while being accessible to everyone on Earth, and we believe Metaplex will play a key role in the development of consumer-facing products that can bring the next 100 million users into the crypto space.