By
Steve Muchoki
April 19th, 2024
Having brought Beeple, a popular NFT artist, on board, the Metaplex network anticipates attracting more digital art collectors.
Stephen Hess, CEO of Metaplex Studios, made several announcements during Solana SOL’s Breakpoint conference in Lisbon, Portugal. Among the top announcements, Hess noted that renowned NFT artist, Beeple, will be joining Metaplex and Solana ecosystems through the Render Network. As a result, Metaplex’s native token, $MPLX, has gained approximately 2.3 percent in the past 24 hours to trade around $0.1018, according to data provided by Binance-backed CoinMarketCap.
“In partnership with the Render Network, we’re excited to welcome Beeple to Metaplex and Solana,” Hess announced, adding that Beeple would be “debuting the future of streaming and immersive 3D NFTs.”
However, the formal announcement is set to be released during the week, as details regarding Bepple joining Metaplex are scarce.
Solana Activity Scales via NFTs Sales on Metaplex
The Solana ecosystem is fighting to remain among the top ten blockchains by market capitalization, currently ranked 10 with a valuation of approximately $11,603,441,959. The Solana network has heavily banked on NFTs, GameFi, and Metaverse in the decentralized financial market.
The Metaplex network is the most extensive NFT protocol on the Solana blockchain, according to onchain data. Since launching in August 2021, Metaplex has helped users mint over 20 million NFTs with over 5.9 million unique collectors. Thereby accounting for nearly 99.9 per cent of the Solana NFT market.
The Metaplex network has constantly built its ecosystem to help Solana gain more users. In recent advancements, Metaplex has announced launching an NFT compression feature to help reduce running costs.
“Metaplex is ushering in the next generation of NFTs on Solana by leveraging on-chain compression to lower the cost to mint and store digital assets dramatically,” Metaplex announced.
Having brought Beeple, a popular NFT artist, on board, the Metaplex network anticipates attracting more digital art collectors. Furthermore, Beeple has a history of creating astounding content, including the $69 million artwork he sold earlier last year.
The Solana ecosystem has recorded an uptick in total value locked in the past year. According to statistical data from Defillama, the Solana network has a total value locked (TVL) of approximately $915 million.
Solend, a crypto lending protocol, is the leading DeFi on Solana with the highest locked TVL of approximately $281 million. Other notable protocols include Marinade Finance, Lido, and Raydium.
Takeaway Notes
According to market data provided by CoinGecko, the SOL coin is trading around $32.39, down approximately 10 per cent in the past 24 hours. Notably, SOL has lost approximately 87 per cent of its value in the past year. Nonetheless, SOL has gained approximately 6372 per cent since its all-time low two years ago.