Magic Eden CEO: Very Natural to Expand From Solana to Ethereum NFTs

In brief

  • Magic Eden co-founder and CEO Jack Lu appeared on Decrypts gm podcast.
  • He discussed the marketplaces recent push into the Ethereum space after starting exclusively with Solana NFTs.

Magic Eden, the leading Solana NFT marketplace, continued its expansion to Ethereum today by rolling out support for a handful of major collections, including the Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy Penguins, and Otherside. Additional projects will be added in the days ahead.

The Magic Ethen push was announced in August as the first step in Magic Edens evolution, first revealed back in June when the firm announced a $130 million raise at a $1.6 billion valuation. Rather than launch its own native Ethereum tech, Magic Eden is aggregating listings from other marketplaces and integrating them within its platform.

Magic Eden co-founder and CEO Jack Lu explained the multi-chain strategy in depth on the latest episode of Decrypts gm podcast. The wide-ranging interview covers everything from Magic Edens own rapid ascentit launched just one year ago this weekto the volatile NFT market, plus the value Lu sees in NFTs for a wide variety of serious future use cases.

According to Lu, going multi-chain was Magic Edens plan from the start, dating back to its earliest pitch decks for investors. However, the company opted to start with Solana, which he said was seen as a frontier ecosystem last year. Magic Eden quickly leapfrogged the small, existing Solana marketplaces and became the dominant player in that market.

When it came time to announce Ethereum support in August, Lu admitted that the Magic Eden team was worried about the reaction from its passionately SOL-centric audience. However, he doesnt believe that the markets are as divided as they might seem on the surface.

Theres actually very high degrees of user overlap between the two ecosystems, Lu told gm co-hosts Daniel Roberts and Stephen Graves. It’s not so mutually exclusively tribal. Initially, that’s what I thought tooits like SOL only, ETH only. But actually, as we dug [in] more to learn about it, actually, a lot of the SOL users came from Ethereum.

Lu said that a lot of the early Solana NFT users had actually come over to the platform after first experimenting on Ethereum. While there are still examples of tribalism amongst notable collectors in both spaces, there are also NFT personalities who have played in both spaces.

For us to move from SOL to ETH, it was actually very natural, said Lu. A lot of those users were like, Oh yeah, well, I’ve got a MetaMask [wallet] already, I already know kind of about the landscape. It makes sense that a Solana marketplace wants to move to Ethereum, as well.

As far as why Magic Eden expanded to Ethereum, theres an obvious answer: its the largest ecosystem in terms of overall trading volume, and holds most of the highest-value projects. There are also likely plenty of users that have only ever collected Ethereum NFTs. But Lu also pointed to things that we have long admired over in the Ethereum space.

There’s some very important user motivations, he explained. There are amazing NFT communities, NFT collections, and NFT creators and culture in the Ethereum ecosystem.

Lu said that in expanding across multiple NFT ecosystemswith Ethereum the first of potentially many additions to comeboth Magic Eden and the wider Solana NFT space can learn from Ethereums NFT culture, and even port over some of those learnings.

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