So, the folks over at Messari put together some research looking at how Metaplex did in the first few months of 2025. It seems things kept humming along, even after the wild ride we saw at the end of last year.
- Metaplex saw steady activity in Q1 2025, with strong usage for fungible tokens even as NFT minting cooled off from the highs of late 2024. The platform passed a billion total transactions, demonstrating its significant role in the Solana ecosystem.
- User engagement remained high, with daily unique signers nearly doubling year-over-year, indicating consistent platform usage beyond fleeting trends. Metaplex also generated substantial protocol fees, driven by the continued demand for creating fungible tokens.
- Metaplex focused on technical improvements, optimizing their Token Metadata program to reduce storage space and return SOL to users. They also continued to foster community engagement through token buybacks, liquidity provider incentives, and partnerships with various projects.
Let’s talk about creating digital stuff on Solana. Metaplex is pretty much the main place people go for that. They have different ways to make things, like Core for regular NFTs (non-fungible tokens), Bubblegum for those compressed ones (cNFTs), and Token Metadata for attaching info to both NFTs and regular tokens, like memecoins or other fungible tokens.
Looking at the numbers, creating fungible tokens using the Token Metadata program actually went up a bit. It rose about 11% compared to the end of 2024. That’s a pretty big jump, like 419% more than the same time the year before. It shows people really like making these kinds of tokens on Solana, maybe for things like token launchpads or even AI tools.
Now, the NFT side saw a bit of a dip from the peak. Daily Core NFT mints dropped around 35%. The compressed NFTs, the Bubblegum ones, fell even more, about 75%. Remember that huge surge in late 2024? This cooldown feels like things just settling back down after all that excitement. But even with the drop, the number of Core NFTs being made daily was still way, way higher than it was a year ago. Like, a massive increase.
It’s kind of funny how things spike and then normalize, isn’t it? Like everyone suddenly decides to do one thing, and then they go back to doing lots of different things, but maybe a bit more of everything than before.
Metaplex hit a big milestone in Q1, passing a billion total transactions. That’s a lot of digital activity. They added over 88 million transactions just in those three months. While it wasn’t quite the dizzying pace of late 2024, they still averaged nearly a million transactions every single day. That kind of steady traffic is a good sign.
User activity also looked strong. They saw a peak of almost 83,000 unique people signing transactions in a single day in January. Even after that peak, the daily average stayed above 23,000, which is almost double what it was the year before. When you look at the whole quarter, the total number of daily unique signers was up 160% year-over-year. That tells you more people are consistently using Metaplex, not just jumping in for a quick trend.
Financially, Metaplex held its ground. They brought in $8.3 million in protocol fees in Q1. That’s about the same as the previous quarter, which was a record. And it’s more than double what they made in the first quarter of 2024. January was actually their best month ever for fees, hitting $4.3 million. This resilience in fees, even when some minting numbers cooled off, points to the continued demand for creating fungible tokens.
Metaplex uses half of the fees collected on Solana to buy back their own token, MPLX. They bought back 22 million MPLX tokens in Q1. That’s about 2.2% of the total supply. Over time, they’ve bought back quite a bit, around 7.45% of the total supply cumulatively. It’s a way the protocol shares its success with the token holders, in a roundabout way.
They also did some clever stuff under the hood. Metaplex worked on optimizing their Token Metadata program. Think of it like tidying up digital closets. They made the accounts for these tokens smaller. This optimization helped resize over 3 million NFTs. What did that do? It gave back over 7,000 SOL (that’s Solana’s native token) to users and saved a good chunk of storage space on the blockchain. Making things more efficient is never a bad idea.
The MPLX token isn’t just for buybacks, though. If you hold MPLX, you can vote on important decisions for the protocol, like how treasury funds are used or changes to the system. They also use MPLX to reward people who provide liquidity, which just means making it easier for others to buy and sell MPLX on trading platforms.
They ran an “Earn” campaign for liquidity providers in Q1, which really boosted how easy it was to trade MPLX. Liquidity went up significantly. They even approved a second season of the campaign to keep that momentum going. It’s a way to encourage community participation and make the token more accessible.
Metaplex also kept busy with partnerships and integrations. They gave grants to projects like One Mug Coffee and weRate to help them use Metaplex Core. They sponsored tracks in Solana competitions, supporting creators and educational content. They even partnered with Drift Protocol on an accelerator program for DeFi projects on Solana. And Pump.fun, that popular spot for launching tokens, integrated with Metaplex for their new trading feature.
Big companies and projects are building on Metaplex too. You’ve got AI projects using it, NFT platforms, gaming companies using Core assets or cNFTs for in-game items, and even real-world assets (RWAs) like tokenized securities are using the standard. And yes, even a former US President launched a token using Metaplex Token Metadata. It just goes to show the range of things people are doing with it.
They added some new faces to the team, like a Head of Communications and a Business Development manager. They also ran a community campaign that got a lot of people talking about Metaplex online. It seems like they’re putting effort into building the community and getting the word out.
So, Q1 was a period of solid activity for Metaplex. Things settled down a bit from the late 2024 frenzy, but the core usage, especially for fungible tokens, stayed strong. Fees were steady, users were more engaged year-over-year, and they made some real progress on the technical side with that optimization. They seem well-positioned as the go-to place for digital assets on Solana.
