What To Know About Magic Eden, The Rapidly Growing NFT Marketplace

Magic Eden is an NFT Marketplace that holds projects of all kinds, but with a few distinctions that make it stand out from others.

It has become the go-to NFT marketplace on Solana, where celebrities such as Reid Hoffman’s Dall-e-2, Lonzo Ball (joining with Michael Jordan and his son Jeffrey on HEIR), and “born-again Solano (SOL) proponent” Mike Tyson have joined in on the run on Ethereum-based projects during a time when collectors are looking for NFT alternatives with lower transaction fees.

While other marketplaces stayed laser-focused on building the Ethereum community, Magic Eden's founders were anticipating the need for lower-cost NFTs.

Magic Eden’s Australian-born co-founders Jack Lu and Zhuoxun Yin jumped on this and created their own wave before the $2 trillion crypto bear market hit that started decimating NFT trade volume in June. Magic Eden is now the second-largest NFT marketplace in the world and hosts 22 million+ unique monthly visitors, 8,000+ collections, and 100,000+ wallet connections daily.

The biggest thing that stands out about Magic Eden is the focus on gaming. Patrick Schulte, founder & president of Metaops, the #1 first-person shooter on Solana says that Magic Eden is a builder’s marketplace.

This connects with the message that Magic Eden is a “community-centric” marketplace as they have continuously promoted to further separate themselves from their competitors.

On the site when you click on the “Eden Games” section of the sidebar, you’ll find a plethora of Solana-based games all vying to be the next big thing in blockchain gaming.

Schulte further explains “We were originally on a layer-2 Ethereum-based protocol but found it was too hard to onboard people to our game and IMX at the same time. We found Solana to be much more user friendly and when we moved to Solana we were able to be the first to include NFTs in game within two days.”

The combination of low transaction fees and easy onboarding has allowed gaming to flourish on the platform in a way we have yet to see on other platforms. There is of course Fractal, co-founded by Justin Kan (Co-Founder of Twitch), Robin Chan (Zynga), David Wurtz (Google Drive), and Mike Angell (Fast & Shopify) -but is focused solely on gaming whereas you can find all kinds of NFT projects on Magic Eden including gaming.

Recently Magic Eden has announced the next evolution for their platform, which is to add Ethereum (ETH) to their offerings and expand access for NFT creators and collectors. Magic Eden’s ETH entry is “designed to deliver multi-chain solutions that can serve both NFTs creators and collectors with the best experience possible. This will include features such as: Magic Eden List (a whitelist and audience targeting tool), Magic Eden Launchpad (now with ETH/SOL compatibility), and Magic Eden Drop Calendar in August.

In the past 18 months we have witnessed massive growth across both ETH and SOL NFT markets, which include completely distinct communities, and with this move Magic Eden is hoping to bring those two universes closer together. To extend their relationship with ETH NFT creators, their ETH-compatible launchpad will feature the same minting set-up, white-glove marketing support, and build-outs for bespoke launches.