5.4 The Metaplex NFT Standard

The Kanon NFT and its underlying infrastructure will all be built internally using the set of open source tools provided by Metaplex Studios (aka ‘Metaplex’). The Metaplex toolkit is designed to provide NFT creators an easy way to bootstrap creating, launching and providing a marketplace for trading NFTs on Solana

Metaplex has achieved overwhelming traction in the short period of time since it started in early 2021. The vast majority of NFT projects are currently being built using Metaplex, and the metadata and associated specifications on the Metaplex docs and GitHub pages can be considered de-facto standards for NFTs on the Solana blockchain. What this means is that in addition to the dramatically reduced time-to-mint for NFTs built using Metaplex, an NFT creator conforming to the Metaplex specifications will be ensured compatibility with the growing community of Dapp developers also building on Solana. For example, conforming to the Metaplex specification means an NFT creator’s image assets and metadata will be shown by the Solana popular wallets.

For those familiar with Ethereum, Metaplex implements a similar set of features and metadata standard as found in the Ethereum ERC-721 and ERC-1155 specification.