Magic Eden NFT Explained
The most well-known NFT market on Solana, a blockchain that competes with Ethereum, is called Magic Eden. It enables you to sell non-fungible tokens (NFTs), which are special cryptocurrency tokens that typically contain a link to a digital artwork, song, or in-game collectible.
The corporation, whose core ecosystem and main blockchain is Solana, declared on August 2, 2022 that it is going multichain and will expand its offerings to Ethereum NFTs.
Magic Eden announced a contentious shift to an optional royalty model on October 14, 2022. The company said that the move was necessary due to market conditions and that it “was effectively a race to the bottom.” Additionally, they declared that they would forgo their 2% platform charge in favor of using the money to create tools for enforcing royalties.
Magic Eden History
In September 2021, four friends—chief technology officer Sidney Zhang, a former developer for Uber Eats, CEO Jack Lu, a former employee of FTX; chief operating officer Zhuoxun Yin, a former product manager for Coinbase; and chief engineer Zhuojie Zhou, a former Facebook developer—founded the marketplace.
With support from Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, Electric Capital and Greylock led a $130 million Series B investment round for Magic Eden in July 2022. The market was valued at $1.6 billion after the financing round, which came after a $27 Series A in March.
Magic Eden vs. OpenSea
Magic Eden’s trading volume on Solana surpasses that of OpenSea, the industry leader in NFT trading, which started adding support for Solana in April 2022. According to a dashboard on Dune Analytics from SeaLaunch that pulls trade data from the two platforms’ trading costs, Magic Eden takes 97% to 99% of the daily volume for Solana NFTs.
OpenSea continues to be the bigger platform when it comes to daily sales across all blockchains, nevertheless. As of this writing, Magic Eden is averaging about 55,000 SOL each day, or $2.1 million, while OpenSea records trades approximately $15 million worth of Ethereum per day.
The primary distinction between the two markets is network dominance. Since Solana is Ethereum’s competitor, Magic Eden and OpenSea continue to rule on quite distinct terrains. As of August 2022, Solana differs mostly from Ethereum in that it is less expensive and faster to utilize.
Venture capitalists and prominent figures, such as Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, and Three Arrows Capital, a defunct but formerly well-known cryptocurrency venture capital fund, were big fans of the network’s token, SOL. SOL fell precipitously from $258 in November 2021 to lows of $26 in mid-June following the 2022 crypto market meltdown.
