Citing people familiar with the matter, The Block reported that several cryptocurrency funds, including Pantera Capital and ParaFi Capital, recently purchased a large number of Metaplex (MPLX) tokens from Wave Digital Assets. Funds involved in the transaction also confirmed the news, The tokens were allegedly initially held by assets left behind after FTX went bankrupt.

All MPLX tokens held by FTX have been bought out

Citing bankruptcy documents, sources stated that FTX originally held 72.6 million MPLX tokens in legacy assets, of which 62.6 million were privately sold over the past five months, representing all of the MPLX tokens unlocked in FTX assets at that time. In addition, sources cited on-chain data said that an additional 2.5 million tokens were transferred from the FTX wallet last month, leaving only 7.5 million tokens left to be sold, which will be fully unlocked on September 19.

Metaplex is a Solana-based protocol that supports the creation of digital assets including fungible tokens (FT) and non-fungible tokens (NFT). Since its launch in 2021, Metaplex claims its platform has facilitated the minting of more than 550 million assets, reaching 55 million unique wallets.

MPLX Institutional Purchase Price

James Ho, co-founder and managing partner of Modular Capital, one of the funds buying MPLX from Wave Digital, said:

"Metaplex standards have been adopted by top projects such as Helium, Tiplink, Driphaus, Pump.fun and Dialect, covering a variety of application scenarios from decentralized physical infrastructure (DePINs) to payments, messaging and the creator economy. 2024 To date, Metaplex has generated fees for 70,000 SOLs, equivalent to approximately $13 million to $14 million per year. We believe Metaplex has a bright future with its complete suite of infrastructure standards available to creators and token issuers. support."

Modular Capital allegedly purchased approximately 700,000 tokens in April at an average price of $0.21 per token, representing a discount of approximately 25% to 30%. According to data from CoinGecko, MPLX is currently priced at $0.25, giving it a fully diluted valuation of approximately $245 million.

Is MPLX undervalued by the market?

Ryan Watkins, co-founder of Syncracy Capital, said MPLX remains overlooked by the market and trades at an undervalued price-to-earnings multiple. Ryan Watkins believes that Metaplex is an important infrastructure for Solana’s digital asset economy and will eventually become one of the most valuable projects on Solana. Ryan Watkins confirmed that Synracy purchased $1.4 million worth of MPLX tokens in April at $0.20 per token, a discount of approximately 40% at the time.

In addition to the two funds mentioned above, institutions such as Pantera, ParaFi and Theia Blockchain also purchased MPLX tokens from Wave Digital. Theia co-founder Felipe Montealegre confirmed the deal but declined to provide specific details. On the other hand, sources revealed that Pantera Capital and ParaFi Capital jointly led the purchase of MPLX.

Pantera Capital portfolio manager Cosmo Jiang confirmed the institution is a holder of MPLX tokens and said Metaplex is in line with Pantera’s long-term investment strategy, which focuses on high-quality protocols with market fit and value growth potential. ParaFi Capital investor Josh Solesbury also confirmed their investment in MPLX.

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