The Metaplex Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and growing the Metaplex protocol, which underpins the majority of Solana NFT projects and apps, announced the launch of Metaplex Core, a next generation Solana NFT standard. Core improves minting costs and Solana network load by over 85% for on-chain assets.

Key to Core’s innovation is a single account model combined with a highly flexible plugin system. While other standards inherit the data for an entire fungible token program, Core assets store all key data in a single Solana account. 

The Metaplex Foundation also 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. MPLX is the governance and utility token that serves as the native token for the Metaplex protocol. 

Highlights for Developers

Cost Efficiency: Core assets require less rent and compute than token-based alternatives. An NFT that would cost .0220 SOL to mint with Token Metadata can be minted with Core for .0037 SOL. 

Improved Developer Experience: Core’s single account design reduces complexity for both on-chain programming and application development. 

Enhanced Collection Management: With first-class support for collections, developers and creators can easily manage collection-level configurations such as royalties and plugins, which can be uniquely overridden for individual assets. This can be done in a single transaction, reducing collection management costs and Solana transaction fees.

Advanced Plugin Support: From built-in staking to asset-based point systems, the plugin architecture of Metaplex Core opens up a wide field of utility and customization opportunities. Plugins allow developers to to hook into any asset life cycle event like create, transfer and burn to add custom behaviors.

Compatibility and Support: Fully supported by the Metaplex Developer Platform, Core is set to integrate seamlessly with a suite of SDKs and supporting programs.

Out of the Box Indexing - 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.

Early Core Adopters

Tensor, Solana’s number one marketplace, will support trading for Core NFTs on launch, providing creators and collectors the platform support needed for new collections.

Claynosaurz will be launching their NFT NYC Booster Packs on Core, as well as using the new program to power their upcoming Dactyl Raffle.

Leading infrastructure providers such as Triton and Extrnode will offer RPC and DAS support at launch, providing developers with indexing solutions to power their applications.

Other top Solana projects such as Sniper, Solflare, Mallow, Truffle and dReader will also be adding support for Core, offering users an array of options for creating, collecting, and interacting with the next generation of Solana NFTs.

About the Metaplex Protocol

Metaplex is a digital asset protocol that underpins the Solana NFT ecosystem. Known for providing the first Solana NFT standard, on-chain royalty enforcement and compressed NFTs, Metaplex was the most used protocol on Solana in February with 96 million transactions and 693 thousand unique signers.

About the Metaplex Foundation

The Metaplex Foundation is a Cayman Islands non-profit foundation that supports the development and growth of the Metaplex protocol.

For further information, visit metaplex.com or contact @metaplex on Twitter/X for more information.

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