Magic Eden Having ‘Best Year Ever’ Despite NFT Market Slump: CEO
Whereas the NFT market has misplaced appreciable steam since peaking two years in the past, {the marketplace} Magic Eden has been reaching new heights by itself, in line with CEO Jack Lu.
“Despite the fact that the general market has been a bit comfortable, the 12 months has been fairly good for Magic Eden,” he stated in an interview with Decrypt (video beneath). “2024 has truly been our greatest 12 months ever.”
When Magic Eden launched in September 2021, the NFT market noticed $4.2 billion in JPEGs commerce palms, in line with CryptoSlam. At the moment, Magic Eden was precluded from among the NFT market’s buzziest tasks, as probably the most profitable ones ran rampant on Ethereum.
Solely providing Solana NFTs in its early days, Magic Eden pioneered a multi-chain strategy to buying and selling digital collectibles because the NFT market cooled. Coming into its third 12 months, {the marketplace} has constructed out help for digital collectibles on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, and Base.
Splintering throughout a myriad of networks, Lu stated that the corporate has recognized two issues NFT house owners worth: content material and comfort. Despite the fact that it may be a heavy technical carry, Lu stated that customers will gravitate in the direction of platforms that function a one-stop store for digital property.
As of final month, NFT buying and selling volumes had shrunk to $373 million, representing a 91% drop from when Magic Eden arrived to the NFT market. Nonetheless, Lu stated that Magic Eden has achieved a 70% share of income inside the NFT market, partly by having a presence on a number of chains.
“We invested actually onerous into this multi-chain thesis,” he stated. “If we could be the platform that gives vary throughout all of these chains, finally we are going to win.”
Magic Eden’s greatest opponents, OpenSea and Blur, have additionally expanded their choices to incorporate different networks. Except for Solana, they’re all EVM-compatible, which means that builders aware of writing Ethereum sensible contracts can leverage comparable code.
Notably, Magic Eden jumped toes first into the marketplace for Ordinals, a category of Bitcoin-based collectibles that rose to prominence final 12 months. Whereas the atmosphere is much totally different from its Solana-based roots, Magic Eden ventured additional into the Bitcoin house with help for Runes.
Runes resemble fungible tokens like ERC-20s on Ethereum. In Might, when the marketplace for Runes ran sizzling, Lu estimated that Magic Eden’s month-to-month buying and selling quantity hit $800 million. Whereas there was a burst of Runes exercise in August, exercise related to them has largely fallen off.
Casting a big internet is helpful when crypto tendencies can change on a dime, Lu stated, evaluating a current, industry-wide bout of meme coin mania to meals tokens standard in decentralized finance years in the past. Alongside these traces, Lu stated Magic Eden’s just lately launched digital pockets positioned the corporate to deal with broader components of the crypto market with help for cross-chain swaps.
“Markets go up and down, metas change,” Lu stated. “If we wish to construct nice merchandise, one thing that may truly attain our mission, we now have to have a stage of long-term pondering.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
