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Q56. Metaplex is an open source protocol that allows for the creation and minting of NFTs using a standardized format across wallets and applications. It is essentially the backbone architecture for Solana NFTs. How many NFTs have been minted over the past week? Since the beginning December, how many NFTs have been minted per week? Chart the growth of unique purchasers over time. What percentage of all mints have been via Metaplex's Candy Machine?
Who doesn't like a sweet?
Metaplex is a collection of tools, smart contracts, and more designed to make the process of creating and launching NFTs easier. While initially focused on supporting the needs of the arts and entertainment industry, it plans to extend far beyond that to all use cases where an NFT may add value.
The Candy Machine v2™ (CM_v2) is a Profile Picture (PFP) focused tool that works like the gumball-style candy machines of old. It launched in December 2021 and substituted the Candy Machine v1™ (CM_v1), which has been deprecated since.
This dashboard will analyse the dominace of Metaplex's Candy Machine in terms of global NFT creation market.
Methodology
The solana.fact_nft_mints was queried to obtain the number of weekly and cumulative NFT mints as well as the number of weekly and cumulative unique wallets (purchasers) and grouping the program_id in three different groups:
program_id = 'cndy3Z4yapfJBmL3ShUp5exZKqR3z33thTzeNMm2gRZ'as CM_v2 for Candy Machine v2program_id = 'cndyAnrLdpjq1Ssp1z8xxDsB8dxe7u4HL5Nxi2K5WXZ'as CM_v1 for Candy Machine v1- any other program as Other_program
The analysis was done since Decemeber 1st 2021 until present.
Conclusions
The dominance of Candy Machines is very clear. They dominanted the market with their previous Candy Machine (v1) and after releasing v2 have conquered the top once again. Both studied metrics - minted NFTs and purchasers - verify the initial statement - it is the backbone architecture for Solana's NFT.
Reading through their documentation a lot of improvements have been included in the v2 (like Unpredictable mint index and hide-and-reveal drops), so I feel this competitive advantage will keep going forward. Who doesn't like a sweet?
Figures 1a. and 1b. show the weekly number of minted NFTs over time, in absolute value and normalized respectively.
The trend clearly shifts from a very significant dominance of CM_v1 to a transition phase at the end of January where CM_v2 numbers are similar to all the other programs to the current state where CM_v2 reaches the same dominance levels as CM_v1.
Last week, over 182k NTFs were minted on CM_v2, 38k on other programs and 1,2k in CM_v1, totalling over 220k NTFs mints in Solana.
Figure 2. shows the cumulative number of minted NFTs over time, where the total number of CM_v2 mints can be visualized clearly: since its launch, more than 3M NFTs have been minted. Figure 3. shows the distribution of minted NFTs by program. 55% of all Solana NFTs have been minted with Candy Machine v2 since December 2021, which adds to over 80% when considering both Candy Machine's versions.
Figure 4. shows the number of weekly and the cumulative unique NFT purchasers by program. A similar trend as with number of minted NFTs can be observed.
There is an accelerated growth happening in February, with over 100k unique purchasers on two consecutive weeks. Since then, it has been declining until 40k purchasers from last week.
Figure 5. shows the number of cumulative unique purchasers by program. Over 660k users have purchased CM_v2 NFTs as opposed to 420k from other programs and 204k from CM_v1. Figure 6. shows the distribution of purchasers by program, here the trends are analogue to minted NFTs but with slighty lower dominance of Metaplex's tool - 51% for CM_v2 and 67% for both versions.