Metaplex has become the new NFT standard for Solana by taking advantage of its Sealevel smart contracts. Solana can process tens of thousands of contracts in parallel, using as many cores as are available to its validator. Metaplex is a protocol built on top of Solana, The Ecosystem comprises four different contracts. Each of these contracts has unique features which accommodate the two core components of the Metaplex ecosystem, The Solana on-chain program, and the Metaplex self-hosted front-end web3 application.
Solana on-chain program -
The Solana Program Library (SPL) is a collection of on-chain programs targeting the Sealevel parallel runtime. These programs are tested against Solana’s implementation of Sealevel, Solana runtime, and deployed to its mainnet. As others implement Sealevel, Solana accepts patches to ensure the programs are portable across all implementations.
Metaplex self-hosted front-end web3 application
⦁ Creating/Minting non-fungible tokens;
⦁ Starting a variety of auctions for primary/secondary sales;
⦁ and Visualizing NFTs in a standard way across wallets and applications.
Metaplex has developed an ecosystem where multiple contracts could be run parallel to each other and contribute to one another. Of all the four contracts, Only one contract known as the Metaplex can interact with the other three contracts. However, All four contracts are responsible for the full life cycle of a token becoming an NFT and getting auctioned. Adoption of multiple contracts for NFT has its perks.
The Contracts
Token Metadata - It allows you to decorate your mint with a Metadata (PDA) Personal Digital Assistant that gives it a name, symbol, Uniform resource identifier, list of creators with royalty splits, and whether or not it's been sold. The existence of Metadata and its sister PDA makes a very powerful combination for a mint that enables the entire rest of the Metaplex contract stack.
Token Vault - It allows you to create a vault where you can insert any number of tokens from any number of mints. The vault can be Activated to lock all the content and transactional states and can be combined (opened) to allow access to the contents and transactional state to continue. The vault will also consider your market price of the token as the vault price allowing vault owners to sell their NFTs on other mediums such as DEX or AMM.
Auction - The only purpose of this contract is to track who won what place in the auction and collect money for those wins. when you place bids or cancel them you are interacting with this contract. It makes use of the resource address and uses an auction mechanism to auctions off that resource.
Metaplex- This contract acts as an Auction manager or an NFT standard just like other NFT standards like ERC721 non-fungible token standard. its main purpose is to understand that the content of the vault is of a different type of token or an NFT token. The contract also deals with arrangements such as
⦁ Full Rights Transfers (Giving away token + metadata ownership)
⦁ Single Token Transfers (Giving away a token but not metadata ownership)
