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 response to CEO Jack Lu.
“Although the general market has been a bit delicate, the yr has been fairly good for Magic Eden,” he mentioned in an interview with Decrypt (video under). “2024 has really been our greatest yr ever.”
When Magic Eden launched in September 2021, the NFT market noticed $4.2 billion in JPEGs commerce arms, in response to CryptoSlam. At the moment, Magic Eden was precluded from among the NFT market’s buzziest tasks, as essentially the most profitable ones ran rampant on Ethereum.
Solely providing Solana NFTs in its early days, Magic Eden pioneered a multi-chain method to buying and selling digital collectibles because the NFT market cooled. Coming into its third yr, {the marketplace} has constructed out assist for digital collectibles on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon, and Base.
Splintering throughout a myriad of networks, Lu mentioned that the corporate has recognized two issues NFT house owners worth: content material and comfort. Although it may be a heavy technical raise, Lu mentioned that customers will gravitate in 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 mentioned that Magic Eden has achieved a 70% share of income throughout the NFT market, partly by having a presence on a number of chains.
“We invested actually onerous into this multi-chain thesis,” he mentioned. “If we could be the platform that gives vary throughout all of these chains, ultimately we are going to win.”
Magic Eden’s greatest rivals, OpenSea and Blur, have additionally expanded their choices to incorporate different networks. Other than Solana, they’re all EVM-compatible, which means that builders accustomed to writing Ethereum good contracts can leverage comparable code.
Notably, Magic Eden jumped ft first into the marketplace for Ordinals, a category of Bitcoin-based collectibles that rose to prominence final yr. Whereas the setting is much totally different from its Solana-based roots, Magic Eden ventured additional into the Bitcoin area with assist 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 traits can change on a dime, Lu mentioned, evaluating a latest, industry-wide bout of meme coin mania to meals tokens in style in decentralized finance years in the past. Alongside these strains, Lu mentioned Magic Eden’s not too long ago launched digital pockets positioned the corporate to deal with broader components of the crypto market with assist for cross-chain swaps.
“Markets go up and down, metas change,” Lu mentioned. “If we wish to construct nice merchandise, one thing that may really attain our mission, we’ve to have a degree of long-term considering.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
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