Building the Foundation for Creator Economy

We at Jump Crypto are very excited to co-lead Metaplex Foundation's $46m strategic funding round and partner with the uniquely qualified team leading the way in building the foundational infrastructure for the creator economy.

Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) have taken the world by storm in the past few months. Beeple, an artist, sold an NFT art piece for $69 million at Christie’s auction house; NFT profile pictures such as CryptoPunks or Bored Apes have multiple million-dollar sales every week, and metaverse land sales have recently topped $100M in weekly revenue. Fortune 500 companies from every consumer segment, including the likes of Nike (a recent purchase of a Web3 brand RTFKT), Adidas (land purchase in Sandbox and partnership with Coinbase), Coca-Cola & Pepsi (NFT launch), Visa (CryptoPunk purchase), and countless other brands that have begun to solidify their presence in the Web3.0 world. Almost every gaming company is considering or experimenting with blockchain gaming and NFTs. EA has gone as far as to call blockchain games and NFTs “the future of the gaming industry.”

However, with mass adoption, creators and collectors are running into significant problems. It’s become clear that mass adoption of NFTs on Ethereum is unsustainable when it costs upwards of $100 to mint an NFT, transaction speeds are extremely slow, and the creation process is quite cumbersome. At Jump Crypto, we believe that for the NFT & metaverse world envisioned by so many companies and people to succeed, interoperability, scaleable minting, and ease of NFT creation is essential.

As many of the newer NFT projects and blockchain gaming companies turn from Ethereum to Solana as a solution for scalability, Metaplex has positioned itself uniquely to tackle all the challenges mentioned above. Metaplex doesn’t just stop at being the engine powering mints of Degen Apes, Boryoku Dragonz, Shadowy Super Coders, Star Atlas assets, and over 5.5 million NFTs on Solana. The protocol and developer tools have been integrated with marketplaces, enterprises, communities, and studios to ease the process of creating NFTs on Solana. Instead of $100 to mint an NFT, it costs less than $2 to do so. The Metaplex Candy Machine, in just half a year, has experienced exponential growth and mints over 80,000 NFTs each day. And they can scale to mint millions more! This scaling will be essential to the future of blockchain gaming and metaverses, as millions of assets will need to be created on the fly, something no current chain or protocol can efficiently handle.

What has us most excited isn’t just the mass minting capabilities – it’s the vision of interoperability. As Web3 infrastructure builders and investors in multiple NFT and blockchain gaming platforms, we firmly believe that interoperability is a must for metaverses and games to thrive. Furthermore, a unified NFT standard is of utmost importance to attain interoperability. Metaplex introduces the much-needed standard NFT metadata structure that we expect to evolve as new use cases develop. META Token holders will play a key role in governing this standard and protocol and vote on the changes that will need to happen as technology evolves. Metaplex aims to become an entire ecosystem, supporting the end-to-end process of on-chain NFT creation and auctioning and delivering an open-source framework for games, marketplaces, and social apps to customize and use.

At Jump Crypto, we believe NFTs will be central to the growth of the creator economy, metaverse creation, blockchain gaming, land sales, entertainment, and many other use cases. In fact, we have collaborated with Metaplex Studios, the leading support organization for the community, and Impossible Finance on an exciting new NFT collection called Extend. This ambitious project seeks to mint the largest collection of NFTs on Solana – one million Spaces! Spaces will be the ultimate customizable NFT on Solana, starting with the ability to customize the color on a collaborative canvas.

Metaplex is extremely well-positioned to define the future of NFTs. We look forward to partnering with the community team on this journey to realize the interoperability vision, where NFTs can frictionlessly move from one platform to another, from game to game, or from the metaverse to metaverse.