The Garden of Magic Eden

Another key tactic that helped drive growth was migrating liquidity for existing collections. “We found that we couldn’t migrate liquidity for existing collections that were already on other marketplaces,” Zhuoxun said. They also recognized that many top existing collections wanted their own white-labeled marketplace, so they offered to build them ... See more

Setting the bar Magic Eden views itself as a steward of the ecosystem—one that is a standard-bearer in the NFT space, carrying a higher degree of responsibility to its users. In a world in which web3 apps are notoriously challenging for newcomers to use, Jack takes the opposite stance, arguing that Magic Eden ought to feel similar to using a web2 a... See more

The last unlock was Launchpad, its full-service NFT minting platform. At the time, it was a challenge for creators to launch NFT projects on Solana. They needed to scour the internet for smart contract developers and pay them to build custom minting sites. In December 2021, Magic Eden started to ramp up its Launchpad operations, onboarding creators... See more

Magic Eden filled a major gap in the market: in a crowded field of NFT marketplaces, it was focused exclusively on Solana, with an emphasis on user experience and lowering the barriers to entry for NFT creators.

Another area of opportunity is social, and owning more community interaction around NFTs. Today, most NFT marketplaces focus on the transaction itself, while the initial stages of creating purchase intent or sparking inspiration happen on other platforms like Discord and Twitter. The user experience is clunky and disjointed: users have to check mul... See more

Mapping a future for—and with—the Magic Eden community Another issue that looms large is Magic Eden’s current platform dependency on the Solana network. During Solana’s recent outage in June—the fifth time the network has gone down in 2022—the network stopped producing blocks for roughly four and half hours. With just 1,000-some validators compared... See more

Avenues for growth One of the team’s strategies for expansion is evident in their clear intention to lean into a verticalized strategy around gaming. As more games launch with NFT elements, and Solana’s low fees and high speed naturally lend itself to gaming use cases, Magic Eden wants to play a bigger role in this ecosystem.

The immediate challenge was building liquidity as quickly as possible—in other words, overcoming the perennial “cold start problem” of jumpstarting a new marketplace. In the fall of 2021, many NFT collections took weeks to reach secondary marketplaces, and in the meantime, users had no way of telling if the listings they came across were reliable o... See more

To ensure that level of accountability, Magic Eden has a comprehensive screening process for new hires. Before every new person joins, they do a one-week work trial at the company, during which they’re onboarded and work alongside the rest of the team. This approach has been successful—the team is now over 100 people.