What’s wrong with Metaplex
And how to fix it
I first would like to thank Superteam’s Writers Cohort, which gave me the motivation to put in writing thoughts I have been contemplating for a long time.
This post is the first piece in a series which will introduce a completely new way to implement digital ownership on blockchains, beyond what all chains have been doing.
Since the project is based on Solana, it will first start by pointing at the flaws of the common solutions for digital ownership on Solana. Next articles will then try to explain the problem of the model of ownership common to most chains, before suggesting an evolution. I will then go over the pieces that enable this revolution, before going over some practical implementations that use this new ownership model. Make sure to follow me if you’re curious about these topics.
What’s Metaplex?
Metaplex is a set of open-source tools to create and distribute NFTs built on the Solana blockchain. It was created in June 2021 and pretty much started the first NFT boom on Solana.
The most used NFT standard on Solana
Approximately 32,000,000 NFTs have been minted on Solana across 253,073 collections, which could amount to a almost 47,000,000 SOL locked up in rent.
Since then, no credible competition has been able to stand up against the network effects that Metaplex has created. The tools are qualitative and it makes it challenging for new comers to propose alternative standard.
A complete set of tools
The Metaplex Program library includes the following programs:
- Auctions tooling with Auction House and Auctioneer
- Bubblegum handles compressed NFTs
- Candy Machine Core, Candy Machine, Fixed Price Sale, NFT Packs and Gumdrop are distribution tools
- Hydra is a fanout wallet
- Token Entangler let’s user rewrap NFTs
- Token Metadata is the NFT standard
What’s wrong with Metaplex?
Despite the long list of things that Metaplex is doing right, there are also several flaws that have been slowing down the Solana NFT ecosystem.
Governance
Like most programs on Solana, Metaplex’s suite of tools is upgradeable. It used to be controlled by a single multisig but Metaplex is now introducing token governance with its $MPLX token.
Token governance has its strength and weaknesses that won’t be addressed here but it remains troubling: a key piece of infrastructure of Solana being able to completely change in a day would completely disrupt the whole ecosystem. Programs like the SPL token standards are immutable and it allows building durable protocols on top, without fearing it would change.
Excessive accounts and their size
Metaplex is composed of many accounts (e.g. Metadata, Master edition, edition, token record, etc…). Not all of them are needed but most of them contain fields that are only used in some specific cases. These extra fields matter because they have a cost: rent.
Rent is an important Solana concept: in order to have some data maintained by validators, users need to lock up some small amount, proportional to the size of the account. Therefore, the bigger the account, the bigger the upfront cost. An ubiquitous standard should strive to have accounts as small as possible, and use extensions to provide additional functionalities.
Limited metadata supported
Metaplex currently only stores a pointer to an external resource. This resource can be stored on decentralized storage solutions like Arweave or IPFS, but it can also be a short-lived AWS S3, possibly rendering your NFT “useless” in a near future.
One of the use case of EVM NFT has been fully on-chain NFT: tokens whose metadata are ENTIRELY stored on the blockchain, with no external dependencies. Allowing a wider range of metadata storage for NFT would be a great feature.
Limited closing ability
As we’ve seen, Solana accounts require rent to be opened. But inversely, they can be closed to return the funds back to the payer of the rent. Because it relies on the standard SPL token program, Metaplex NFTs cannot be fully closed: only the ~350 bytes of metadata can be closed, the 82 bytes of the mint are forever lost, ultimately costing money to minters. Currently, at least 1,000,000$ is forever lost in rent because basic SPL mints cannot be closed
Custom programmability
Metaplex introduced its Programmable NFT standard, allowing more programmability and customization. However, in order to use this functionalities, you need many new accounts, which can increase transaction size to the point where it limits composability, one of the key selling point of Solana.
Moreover, this programmability is done using a useful but complex authentication rule program. Although it enables making programmable NFTs without creating a new program, it significantly increases the difficulty to create and update programmable NFT from a program.
Limited collections functionalities
Finally, collections in Metaplex are a great feature but lack some flexibility. First, they require to verify two fields (collection address and the verified status) because of the way tokens are added to collections. Then, nested collections are difficult to verify in practice because you need to have all the parents collections in the same transactions, increasing its size. Finally, you need the update authority on all tokens to add them to a collection. This is impractical, especially when update authorities are multisigs.
Conclusion
Metaplex has done an incredible job for Solana at large but it became a big and slow behemoth. Alternatives are hard to bootstrap because you need to lobby for integration with all ecosystem participants.
In the next article, we will see what features would enable fixing all the aforementioned issues.
