Holaplex, a community of creator-owned NFT storefronts, recently announced a full-stack, open-source marketplace standard to replace the closed-source, corporate-controlled markets on Solana. Using the Holaplex NFT Marketplace Standard, any brand, collective, DAO or individual can provide the full NFT marketplace experience unique to their brand, curation, values or strategy.
The Holaplex NFT Marketplace Standard utilizes Metaplex‘s Auction House Contract, an escrow-less listing system. This means NFTs stay in the owner’s wallet until sold and do not require the NFT to move into a smart contract vault. Collectors can make and accept offers or list at a fixed price.
“The Holaplex NFT Marketplace Standard was created in response to community demand to put an end to extractive secondary market practices and give creators open-source tools to control their destiny. Community members have full control over their collections; this includes setting transaction fees,” said Alex Kehaya, co-founder of Holaplex Community.
We asked Alex Kehaya about Holaplex and where the NFT marketplace is heading.
GD: How did you get started? What inspired you to create Holaplex?
Alex Kehaya: My co-founder, Brian Fox, was one of the earliest contributors to the free software and open-source movements to keep code and computing in the hands of the creators and community. When we saw NFT marketplaces undertake the same closed, walled-garden approaches that Facebook, YouTube and Apple used to limit choice and extract value from creators, we co-founded the Holaplex community to bring open ownership to every single NFT creator and buyer .
GD: What drew your attention to NFT’s? Why choose the Solana blockchain?
Alex Kehaya: At its essence an NFT is digital rights management at the creator level – not at the corporate level. There’s no reasons corporates cannot also be creators, but the individual user-level rights built into a digital asset created with a non-fungile token is fundamentally new technology that has never existed before. To control the digital rights to a unique asset using cryptography, permissionless blockchains and a global economy tied to cryptocurrency is a paradigm shift in eCommerce few understand – and a fundamental shift in the creator economy. It’s a shift from creators contributing to economic opportunity of a private platform in hopes that it trickles down to them and a shift to a creator-owned economy that can support the building of global brands and labels as long as they support creator-first values. To support this movement, the Holaplex community is building for all blockchains but we chose to start at the Solana blockchain because of its global performance, super low-cost and energy-efficiency – a recent study found a Solana transaction required the same electricity as a couple of good searches. Again, to serve all creators best we couldn’t impose huge startup costs or create a huge carbon footprint.
GD: What does Holaplex offer for customers of NFT’s? What tools do you have available for customers and sellers?
Alex Kehaya: Holaplex, Inc. is building a suite of tools on behalf of the Holaplex NFT community. Creators can mint and auction their digital goods and collectors can discover offerings from thousands of stores opened by creators, collectives and NFT DAOs. We just created the NFT Marketplace Standard to offer and totally free and open-source means for any creator of brand to make a marketplace that will deliver featurs and experience buyers expect from closed-source, corporately-controlled marketplaces. And creators and collectors can use our open-source tools without needing to know how to code and open-source developers can freely contribute to the codebase or fork projects to pursue their vision of how a free and accessible NFT ecoystem should work.
GD: How do you benefit/empower independent creators?
Alex Kehaya: When people think of indie creators they think of individuals but the Holaplex community thinks of indie as independent of centralized control and independent of rent-seeking platforms that take more value than they create and only benefit the top most participants. Both individuals, collectives, brands and DAOs are part of the Holaplex NFT community, but they all share the principle that Web3 by definition is user-owned and community-driven. We don’t need another Spotify or Instagram that takes from the community and gives to advertisers and a few break out popular stars. The Holaplex community invests in itself and by doing so lifts up every creator – and yes, even the huge brands that use our tools. Everyone in the community who gives, gets back in return and builds an even stronger community that we all believe will replace centralized brands in the long run.
GD: What’s next for Holaplex? What technology/tools are you developing and could you go into more detail about them?
Alex Kehaya: Holaplex builds what the community wants and needs foremost. By building open-source and on-chain, rather than through closed-platforms and privately-controlled databases, Holaplex must build a number of infrastructure and protocol layer solutions that can power infinite numbers of each tool or “product.” For example, the open-source software behind Holaplex NFT Marketplace Standard can power an infinite number of marketplaces and permuations of marketplaces. So each time we launch one of these tools it has been built to support thousands and thousands of instances. We have also built an Indexer which will power any number of services that NFT buyers and creators may want. And we have begun leaking a bit of alpha on the open-source social graph and decentralized exchange technology that is forthcoming. Ultimately, because we are radically open, creators and collectors should drop into our Discord or Twitter to AMA and developers can visit our Github to see everything the community aims to build and pick-up a bounty or grant to build along with us.
