Magic Eden Having ‘Best Year Ever’ Despite NFT Market Slump: CEO

Whereas the NFT market has misplaced vital momentum since its peak two years in the past, the Magic Eden market has reached new heights by itself, in accordance with CEO Jack Lu.

“Though the general market was a bit weak, the yr was fairly good for Magic Eden,” he mentioned in an interview with Declutter (video beneath). “2024 has really been our greatest yr ever.”

When Magic Eden launched in September 2021, $4.2 billion price of JPEGs have been traded, in accordance with the NFT market. CryptoSlam. On the time, Magic Eden was excluded from a few of the hottest tasks within the NFT market as essentially the most profitable ones reigned supreme on Ethereum.

Magic Eden provided solely Solana NFTs in its early days and pioneered a multi-chain method to digital collectibles buying and selling because the NFT market cooled. Getting into its third yr, the market has constructed out help for digital collectibles on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon and Base.

Unfold throughout many networks, Lu mentioned the corporate has recognized two issues that NFT house owners worth: content material and comfort. Though it might be a heavy technical raise, Lu mentioned customers will gravitate towards platforms that function a one-stop store for digital property.

As of final month, NFT buying and selling volumes had shrunk to $373 million, a 91% drop from when Magic Eden entered the NFT market. Nonetheless, Lu mentioned Magic Eden has achieved a 70% income share inside the NFT market, partly by its presence in a number of chains.

“We’ve got invested very laborious on this multi-chain thesis,” he mentioned. “If we might be the platform that provides attain in all these chains, we are going to in the end win.”

Magic Eden’s greatest opponents, OpenSea and Blur, have additionally expanded their choices to incorporate different networks. Aside from Solana, they’re all EVM suitable, that means builders conversant in writing Ethereum sensible contracts can use related code.

Significantly Magical Eden jumped toes first available in the market for Ordinals, a category of Bitcoin-based collectibles that rose to prominence final yr. Though the setting may be very totally different from its Solana-based roots, Magic Eden ventured additional into the Bitcoin area help for Runes.

Runes are much like fungible tokens reminiscent of ERC-20s on Ethereum. In Could, when the Runes market was scorching, Lu estimated that Magic Eden’s month-to-month buying and selling quantity was $800 million. Though there was a burst of Runic exercise in August, the exercise related to it has largely disappeared misplaced weight.

Deploying a large web is helpful when crypto traits can change on the fly, Lu mentioned, likening a current industry-wide bout of meme coin mania to meals tokens that have been standard within the decentralized finance world years in the past. In that sense, Lu mentioned Magic Eden’s not too long ago launched digital pockets positioned the corporate to attraction to broader swaths of the crypto market with help for cross-chain swaps.

“Markets go up and down, meta’s change,” Lu mentioned. “If we need to construct nice merchandise, one thing that may really obtain our mission, we have now to have a stage of long-term pondering.”

Edited by Ryan Ozawa.