While the NFT market has lost significant momentum since its peak two years ago, the Magic Eden marketplace has reached new heights on its own, according to CEO Jack Lu.
“Even though the overall market was a bit weak, the year was quite good for Magic Eden,” he said in an interview with Declutter (video below). “2024 has actually been our best year ever.”
When Magic Eden launched in September 2021, $4.2 billion worth of JPEGs were traded, according to the NFT market. CryptoSlam. At the time, Magic Eden was excluded from some of the most popular projects in the NFT market as the most successful ones reigned supreme on Ethereum.
Magic Eden offered only Solana NFTs in its early days and pioneered a multi-chain approach to digital collectibles trading as the NFT market cooled. Entering its third year, the market has built out support for digital collectibles on Bitcoin, Ethereum, Polygon and Base.
Spread across many networks, Lu said the company has identified two things that NFT owners value: content and convenience. Even though it may be a heavy technical lift, Lu said users will gravitate toward platforms that serve as a one-stop shop for digital assets.
As of last month, NFT trading volumes had shrunk to $373 million, a 91% drop from when Magic Eden entered the NFT market. Still, Lu said Magic Eden has achieved a 70% revenue share within the NFT market, partly through its presence in multiple chains.
“We have invested very hard in this multi-chain thesis,” he said. “If we can be the platform that offers reach in all those chains, we will ultimately win.”
Magic Eden’s biggest competitors, OpenSea and Blur, have also expanded their offerings to include other networks. Apart from Solana, they are all EVM compatible, meaning developers familiar with writing Ethereum smart contracts can use similar code.
Particularly Magical Eden jumped feet first in the market for Ordinals, a class of Bitcoin-based collectibles that rose to prominence last year. Although the environment is very different from its Solana-based roots, Magic Eden ventured further into the Bitcoin space support for Runes.
Runes are similar to fungible tokens such as ERC-20s on Ethereum. In May, when the Runes market was hot, Lu estimated that Magic Eden’s monthly trading volume was $800 million. Although there was a burst of Runic activity in August, the activity associated with it has largely disappeared lost weight.
Deploying a wide net is beneficial when crypto trends can change on the fly, Lu said, likening a recent industry-wide bout of meme coin mania to food tokens that were popular in the decentralized finance world years ago. In that sense, Lu said Magic Eden’s recently launched digital wallet positioned the company to appeal to broader swaths of the crypto market with support for cross-chain swaps.
“Markets go up and down, meta’s change,” Lu said. “If we want to build great products, something that can actually achieve our mission, we have to have a level of long-term thinking.”
Edited by Ryan Ozawa.
