NFTs are good for bringing non-crypto users on board, says Metaplex CEO

Metaplex Studios recently announced it had appointed Adam Jeffries as the Chief Executive Officer of a new organisation formed to help onboard numerous artists onto its NFT platform.

The Solana-powered on-chain protocol for minting and auctioning NFTs chose Jeffries to lead the charge for advancing the functionality of tools that will enable creators to easily manage their NFT businesses.

Coin Rivet spoke with Jeffries, who gave us a deeper insight into the work of the studio.

He especially stressed that considering NFTs as a purely investment vehicle was a drastic oversimplification of their utilitarian value.

“In reality, they are arguably the most approachable technology to bring non-crypto users into the space – or metaverse,” he said.

“As an investment asset, they can be thought of both as a short-term method of exchange or long-term holding.

“For a short-term exchange, the analogy would be around providing value at a specific moment in time, such as concert tickets with speculation occurring around the event.”

He added that adoption and acceptance was growing every day as more users understand the real potential of NFTs – especially around the community and interaction potential.

Jeffries noted that NFTs have provided the unique opportunity of allowing users and creators to connect through ownership, which is extremely important when it comes to interactions between the two.

“There is now a common ground – an NFT – which connects the creator and the user,” he said.

“NFTs also give creators more of a self-governing role when it comes to earnings and content rights, as well as creating a growing demand from users as the work is limited in quantity.”

With NFTs, anyone can create their own marketplace

What makes the Metaplex protocol unique, Jeffries assures, is that it is fully decentralised and working hard to build new ways for users to interface with its open-source code.

“Metaplex Studios will provide the ability for anyone to create and fully customise their own marketplaces,” he added.

“This would be done in a fully decentralised manner and gives complete control compared to the centralised exchanges available today.

“This allows a user to easily launch a storefront that has basic features such as minting and selling an NFT or build a secondary marketplace where they are able to have a user-to-user resale market.”

Jeffries also added that Metaplex had quite a few community projects currently building on its platform such as Degen Ape Academy, Audius, Aurory, Contrastive, Phantom Wallet, and FTX.

Joining Jeffries is a new board of strategic advisors that include Audius, Meltem Demirors – Chief Strategy Officer at Coinshares, Alex Yamashita, Mark Streeter and Rolf Hoefer, Chris Kalani – Chief Product Officer of Phantom, Dylan Macalinao – co-founder of Saber Labs and Steve Irby – co-founder at Street Dreams Magazine.