This article was originally published in January 2023 and updated in June 2023.
Manifold NFTs are taking the spotlight in NFT town, and we can’t ignore it anymore.
If you have been following crypto art over the past few weeks, you probably have seen, minted, or released work through Manifold.
Manifold logo over Refik Anadol’s T +/- SERIES — ENTRY BURN #1
If you haven’t, no worries; the goal of this issue is to go through Manifold.xyz and explain why its volume has been doubling month to month (it looks like January is going to triple December’s volume).
Manifold claims in December: $4,2M (3.8k Eth).
Manifold claims until January 26th: $11.1M (7.7k Eth).
Manifold claims have almost tripled over the past month.
Manifold Studio is a platform that allows you to mint tokens on your self-deployed creator contract.
It allows you to retain true ownership and maintain the highest level of provenance of your work.
NFT minting is the process of creating an NFT in the blockchain. There are different ways of doing it, and Manifold (or Manifold XYZ) is making it easy to create, customize and deploy NFT smart contracts. You don’t need to be an advanced coder to deploy your own contracts anymore.
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What Manifold is doing is quite crucial for multiple reasons, but I see two clear benefits:
Decentralization and ownership: smart contracts minted through Manifold are genuinely owned by the creator and not just signed (like when using Opensea). With everything that happened recently in the crypto world — like companies going bankrupt and marketplaces not honoring royalties — who knows what else can come next?
Customization: Two years ago, a simple mint on OpenSea or Foundation felt like all we needed. The truth is the space is growing, and so are artists, projects, and collectors’ needs.
BEEPLE (B. 1981) - HUMAN ONE was released at Christie’s and minted with a Manifold smart contract.
Two components make Manifold work (there are more, but I am trying to simplify things… Full documentation can be found here).
Studio: this is where you create the Manifold smart contract and customize it with different add-ons and features.
Gallery: This is where you can create auctions or listings for your NFTs.
One of the most significant advantages is there aren’t any platform fees when selling NFTs on Manifold. Keep in mind gas fees need to be paid by the artists when minting the contract. Also, if a Manifold NFT is sold on other platforms, those platforms’ fees will apply.
Manifold Studio is completely free to use and charges no platform fees or any royalties on sales.
Any costs associated with deploying/minting are the standard gas fees that come with minting on Ethereum mainnet.
Mainframe 1 by ertdfgcvb is a 1/1 piece minted through Manifold.
Sharing NFTs in different marketplaces is critical for discoverability. That is why Manifold is already well integrated with popular open marketplaces (on Ethereum) and could be upon request on curated ones.
Manifold works out of the box with most marketplaces like OpenSea, Rarible, LooksRare, Foundation, and Zora.
For artists, minting an NFT on Manifold alone won’t help much to expand their collector’s base; for collectors, finding and listing their NFTs on popular marketplaces is also essential, which is why smooth integrations are crucial.
Ideally, cross-chain integration is in the making.
Recently, Manifold released a new feature that allows artists to set up “burn and redeem”, where collectors can burn tokens and receive new ones.
Lucrece launched an open edition, “Defy” — commanding over 8k mints for 0.06 ETH (+$800k) just on the primary sales — and quickly followed it up with a burning game called “proceed w/ caution.”
The burning concept isn’t anything new. We have used it multiple times in the and many creators have done so (Lucrece included) via other platforms. Nevertheless, it makes me wonder if upcoming features released by Manifold will get the same level of adoption.
Could Manifold define the “meta” or the trends moving forward?
Although the “burn redeem” token mechanism was released two months ago, it has been quickly incorporated into artists’ and creators’ releases.
Here are some of my favorite artists creating their own intelligent contracts through Manifold…
ALR3V-0KAA:AP No. 1 by Lisa Orth (5 editions) was minted on Manifold
Wifi by Leander Herzog on Foundation, minted with Manifold
Today is my bday and life is about ups and downs, pumps and dumps, and I'm happy and blessed to be here 🙏 👁️ “Pumping” open edition until 8 PM EST 👁️ app.manifold.xyz/c/pumping LFG!
There are ways to use Manifold to create generative art using their extensions, but we will leave that for another day.
Until next time,
- Kaloh
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