Highlights

- All-time high of 121 million compressed NFTs minted, a 62% increase month-over-month 

- 96 million transactions signed, the highest month on-record and a 68% increase month-over-month

- 693k monthly unique signers, the highest month of all-time

- 10 million new wallets collected an NFT created through Metaplex, the second largest monthly increase of all-time and a 34% increase month-over-month.

- Metaplex hosted cHack and sponsored a compression-focused week at MtnDAO

Protocol Activity

In February, NFT mint activity surged with creators and developers minting 122 million NFTs through Metaplex, including 1.3 million Token Metadata NFTs and 120.7 million compressed NFTs, the highest monthly total ever and a 61% increase month-over-month.

Secondary trading of Solana NFTs exceeded $228 million in February, the third highest total over the past 24 months.

693k unique wallets directly signed transactions with the protocol in February, the highest month of all-time. 

There were over 96 million unique transactions signed this month, an all-time high and a 68% increase month-over-month.

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

As of February, the total number of Metaplex collectors reached 39 million unique wallets, an increase of ~10 million wallets month-over-month, the second largest monthly increase of all-time and a 34% increase month-over-month.

Developer Platform

Non-Custodial Editions

Token Metadata was deployed to devnet with the changes for MIP-7, enabling non-custodial edition printing through Print Delegates. The effort included contributions from projects such as Mallow, Foster, Collector, Solarplex, 3.land, and Artplex, as well as independent artists such as Bloody B and many others.

This functionality is available through the PrintV2 instruction with support published to npmjs in mpl-token-metadata 3.2.0 and http://crates.io in mpl-token-metadata 4.1.0.

DAS support for the new changes have already been adopted by Extrnode as well.

Inscriptions

The developer experience for Metaplex Inscriptions was upgraded with mpl-inscription v0.8.1 being deployed to devnet, http://crates.io, and npmjs. This version adds a mint field to the inscription metadata to assist with indexing, as well as a permissionless setMint instruction to backfill mints on older inscriptions.

Developer Hub

Metaplex’s Developer Hub got a refresh this month. Developers can now more easily find the relevant Metaplex resources for NFT creation, commerce, utility and developer tooling. Additional guides have been added for dev tools such Umi, DAS, and Amman. You can find more about Metaplex’s developer resources here.

Community 

Metaplex cHack

In February Metaplex hosted cHack, a compression-focused hackathon aimed at pioneering the future of NFTs on Solana. 

Partners such as Extrnode, Underdog Protocol, Crossmint and Quicknode contributed free credits for all cHack participants during the hackathon, while SkyRise jumped in to offer branding consultancy and support to select participants.

Many innovative use cases and tooling for compressed NFTs were introduced including:

- Generalized compression including compressed token accounts

- On-chain advertising tools using compression

- Powering on-chain gaming with compressed NFTs as in-game assets

- Incorporating compressed NFTs in loyalty programs

- Using compressed NFTs as transferable wallets

- Compressed inscriptions

- cNFT spam protection

- Decentralized on-chain documentation

- Personalized AI agents represented on-chain as cNFTs

- Unified on-chain health records

- LightDAS for indexing specific Markle Trees

To have a look at some of the highlights, check out the first and second twitter threads of our cHack spotlight series.

Metaplex Week at MtnDAO

In February Metaplex served as one of the headline sponsors for MtnDAO v5, Solana’s premier coworking event hosted each February in Salt Lake City. 

As part of MtnDAO, Metaplex sponsored a compression-focused week including hosting two highly attended workshops throughout the second week of the event.  The first workshop, Hello cNFTs, was a walkthrough for Javascript developers building dApps with Compressed NFTs. The second workshop was focused on learning the fundamentals of how to write Anchor programs that build on Metaplex’s Bubblegum program. 

Metaplex also hosted daily office hours, offering guidance to teams hacking away on their cHack projects or developers just looking to build in general with Metaplex. To top it off, on Saturday every MtnDAO participant was treated to a free ski day sponsored by Metaplex.

Metaplex DAO

Slorg from Sol Incinerator submitted a MIP for combating cNFT spam. The proposal aims to make certain protocol-level changes to Bubblegum that would make it harder to create transaction breaking cNFTs. The proposal will be moving to a DAO vote shortly.

Furthermore, the Metaplex Foundation organized a working group with project founders from across the ecosystem in order to solicit additional ideas around how to solve the problem of cNFT spam.

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.

• Legends of the Sun, released Generalized Compression (“GC”). With GC, Legends of the Sun (“LotS”) were able to reduce the cost of deploying new token accounts by 280x. Utilizing Metaplex’s Bubblegum program, LotS will make it easier for gaming projects to utilize in-game assets at a fraction of the cost. 
• Rain.fi, an NFTfi platform, launched the first SPL loans for Solana NFTs. This advancement allows users to borrow various SPL tokens against their NFTs, providing liquidity to participate in DeFi more easily, while still retaining ownership of their NFTs.
• The Primes launched a raffle aggregator platform dubbed SuperSweep, powered by AssetDash. SuperSweep will not only afford users the ability to create raffles on The Primes platform, but users will also be able to integrate them into third party platforms. NFTs, tokens, and whitelist spots for upcoming mints are enabled for raffling.
• Magic Eden expanded its integration with Metaplex, offering support for Token22 (Token Extensions) through Token Metadata. 
• Solana Mobile’s Chapter 2 pre-order crossed over the 100,000 presale marker, securing over $45M for development. As part of the launch, POAP NFTs powered by Underdog, were awarded to the top 1,500 users who contributed the most referrals to the product’s successful launch. 
• Crossmint launched API support for dynamic compressed NFTs, powered by Metaplex’s Bubblegum program. Their new API allows users to easily edit and burn compressed NFTs, resulting in NFTs that can evolve over time or be updated. 
• Superteam Earn, which has produced many important contributions to the Solana NFT ecosystem, crossed 10K users, a big milestone for the “work2earn” platform powered by Solana Superteam‍
• Deez Nuts, the pioneers of tinySPL tokens on Solana powered by Bubblegum, released a new liquid hybrid token whereby the NFT evolves as users accumulate more of the underlying token.

Creator Ecosystem 

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

• CryptoUndeads launched “Inscryptions” powered by Metaplex Inscriptions. Each collector was able to opt-in to the inscription process in order to move their collectible on-chain and strengthen its provenance.
• pRHO announced their new liquid hybrid token called RHO, which is built on top of Metaplex and uses pNFT inscriptions that can be burned for fungible T22 tokens and vice versa. It includes novel claim mechanics in order to incentivize broad community distribution. 
• Aurory, an OG Solana NFT gaming project, launched their Seekers of Tokane free-to-play game on Epic Games. 
• Claynosaurz launched class selection for its NFTs. With six available classes available for the Genesis collection, holders will have to choose what path to take without knowing how it can impact future gameplay. As the team is building their own gaming app and ecosystem, if you’re a Clayno holder go select your class to see what armor your dino gets equipped with!
• Dino Bonus News: In collaboration with Magic Eden, the Clayno team released a FREE open edition claimable using ONLY the Magic Eden wallet - the first of three custom open editions celebrating the launch of the ME wallet.
• Parcl introduced $PRCL, their governance token slated for release in April. Intended to be used for data access and incentives within its ecosystem, they’ve also seen outsized interest recently for their Parcl Home Owners Association (HOA) NFTs built on Token Metadata, which give a points multiplier for their upcoming airdrop.
• MonkeDAO released a free open edition claimable through the Magic Eden wallet. This was the second open edition celebrating the launch of the Magic Eden wallet.

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.