SNEAK PEEK
- Eden co-founder and CEO discussed the platform’s move toward the Ethereum network in a podcast.
- He said that it’s very natural to expand from Solana to Ethereum.
- Magic Eden is an NFT marketplace exclusively for Solana NFTs.
Magic Eden co-founder and CEO Jack Lu recently appeared on the Decrypt’s podcast – “Inside NFT Unicorn Magic Eden With Jack Lu”. In the podcast, Jack Lu discussed several aspects of the platform’s surprising push toward embracing the Ethereum network.
He said,
For us to move from SOL to ETH, it was actually very natural,
Magic Eden was on September 17th, 2021 as an exclusive marketplace for Solana NFTs. Within a month of its launch, it dominated the Solana NFT market. The platform continued to climb the success ladder and had listed over 1500 Solana NFTs by December 2021.
One year into its launch, Magic Eden started its expansion to Ethereum. In August 2022, the platform announced its “Magic Ethen” move as a part of the evolution of Magic Eden. In September 2022, Magic Eden extended its support for popular Ethereum NFT collections like BAYC, Pudgy Penguins, and Otherside.
Instead of launching its own Ethereum tech, the platform is integrating listings from other marketplaces into its platform.
In the podcast, Jack Lu said that the strategy to go multi-chain was the platform’s goal right from the start. According to him, it is not a hurried or sudden decision. It was their strategy to first capture the rapidly growing Solana NFT marketplace and become a dominant player in the industry. Then gradually expand the platform’s domain into other blockchain networks.
He also said that his entire team was worried about the reaction from the SOL NFT community when they announced the Ethereum support in August.
Commenting on the divided NFT marketplace, Jack Lu said,
It’s not so mutually exclusively tribal. Initially, that’s what I thought too—it’s 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 also unofficially said that Ethereum is the first of the many additions to the platform. Other additions will be introduced in the coming months that will help to build Magic Eden a cross-chain NFT ecosystem.
