CEO of Magic Eden on the Future of the Billion Dollar NFT Marketplace
It’s been a year since the launch of Magic Eden, the fast-growing NFT marketplace that reached unicorn status with a $1.6 billion valuation.
In September 2021, Magic Eden was founded by four friends with backgrounds from Uber, Facebook, Google, FTX, dYdX and experience across crypto, DeFi, mass consumer market and management. Jack Lu, co-founder and CEO spoke exclusively with Blockster about the future of Magic Eden, from joining more chains and being bullish on games to filling the gaps in existing marketplaces.
“Magic Eden is described as a marketplace, but as a business model it’s much more like a crypto exchange,” explains Jack. The platform gives its users quick access to liquidity, a good understanding of the offer and the opportunity to trade on the market. The Magical Eden the team has created a polished Web3 consumer experience that can be expected more in Web2.
In less than a year, Magic Eden has become the largest Solana-based NFT marketplace, and now it has added Ethereum to its offerings – directly competing with OpenSea. Jack shares that he and his team have a lot of admiration and respect for Ethereum, and from the early days of the company, their growth strategy and long-term roadmap included multi-chain features.
“In the immediate term, there are different ecosystems that are all very well funded, they all have unique value propositions and unique communities, and there will be users there,” says the CEO. “At Magic Eden, our philosophy is to go where the users are and try to serve those users in a world-leading, world-class way.”
The company is very bullish due to the influx of players entering NFTs and cryptos. Jack says NFTs allow players to experience the supercharged version of taking digital asset and game trading to the next level with a real economy of secondary trading, liquidity and open economies.
“It’s the creators who make the use cases, and it’s the use cases that get all the end users to come along. That is our logic for understanding how growth happens.”
Jack Lu, CEO of Magic Eden
Part of Magic Eden’s growth is transitioning from an NFT marketplace to an NFT experience. With the tool and community behind NFTs offering a more fun, social way to experience crypto, Magic Eden is building tools for its users to experience more of the NFT journey on its platform with new features including a management tool, tracking tool and calendar.
Through miserable market conditions, Magic Eden continues its focus on building a user-centric platform that will sustain long-term. “We’re super focused on serving our users, building out the NFT use cases according to our vision and making sure that whatever pain points they have with the NFT experience, we can be the world-leading solution to it,” said Jack Blockster.
“User-obsessed” is one of the core pillars of the company, which Lu says is a guiding light in such a noisy room. Community, creativity and cool are the factors of NFTs that transcend technology and this is how Magic Eden believes NFTs can bridge the next billion users to crypto.
