Magic Eden Tops NFT Marketplace Leaderboard For First Time Ever

Magic Eden Reaches Highest Volume NFT Marketplace

Magic Eden transaction volume traded surpassed OpenSea for the first time ever on May 15 when its daily volume reached $47 million compared to OpenSea at $27 million.

Magic Eden has grown extremely quickly since it opened its doors in September 2021. About 42,000 daily active users rely on the NFT marketplace. Users transact a median daily value of $35 million. For comparison, OpenSea has about 30,000 daily active users and $84 million median daily transaction volume.

Magic Eden And OpenSea Daily Active Users

Source: Avana Wallet and DappRadar

Magic Eden And OpenSea Daily Transaction Volume In US Dollars

Source: Avana Wallet and DappRadar

Largest NFT Marketplaces

Source: DappRadar

Magic Eden is the largest Solana NFT marketplace, and the third largest NFT marketplace for all blockchains when ranking NFT marketplaces by transaction volume.

What Is Magic Eden?

Magic Eden is a community-centric Solana NFT marketplace. Magic Eden airdropped Magic Ticket, its own collection, to over 30,000 users. Holding a Magic Ticket gives holders access to the Magic Eden Discord DAO, MagicDAO. As of May 2022, Magic Eden has monthly traffic greater than 10 million visitors, 7,000 unique NFT collections, 70 team members and over $1.5 billion of NFTs transactions completed. Magic Eden offers a web-based app at magiceden.io, as well as iOS/Android mobile apps.

The Magic Eden developer team is comprised of backgrounds across crypto, DeFi, consumer internet companies and management consulting. The Magic Eden team identified gaps in existing NFT marketplaces and wanted to create something new.

The name Magic Eden was created by Jack, the current CEO. Magic Eden is meant to represent a sense of limitless possibility. Magic Eden believes NFTs are the future of art and culture, and the team sees themselves as stewards of the NFT space.

The Magic Eden team built the most liquid secondary marketplace on Solana and it is the first marketplace to implement bidding, rarity index, and a dedicated minting platform that automatically connects to its secondary marketplace. Currently Magic Eden claims ~90% market share for NFT secondary trading volume on Solana.

Launchpad is the exclusive minting platform hosted by Magic Eden for NFT creators. Magic Eden accepts only 3% of all Launchpad applications and features the best projects on Solana. The minting process helps NFT creators mint NFTs to conform with standardized NFT metadata protocols (see Metaplex).

Magic Eden is backed by leading Web3 and crypto firms including Paradigm, Sequoia, Electric Capital, Variant, Kindred Ventures, Greylock, Coinbase Ventures, and Alemeda Research.

Magic Eden GameFi NFTs

More than 90% of all Solana NFT gaming secondary trading volume occurs on Magic Eden. Magic Eden supports game creators and their communities on Solana. Magic Eden partnered with top gaming projects to launch Eden Games, a place for games to call home on Solana.

Magic Eden Leadership

Jack Lu, CEO

Source: Magic Eden

Jack got into crypto in 2013, when he started hacking on Bitcoin wallet apps. Before co-founding Magic Eden, he worked at FTX where he saw the huge potential in Solana and was inspired to build something with his co-founders. Before FTX, Jack worked at Google as a Product Manager and as a consultant at Boston Consulting Group.

Sidney Zhang, CTO

Source: Magic Eden

Sidney started in crypto with his first crypto company working on the Bitcoin Developer API in 2013. He joined Uber in 2015 as one of the Founding Engineers at Uber Eats, where he worked on Uber Eats from zero till it hit the moon. Sidney subsequently spent a few years at Uber Advanced Technologies Group working on self-driving production modeling and research. focusing on computer vision and prediction. He lastly joined Facebook’s AI team before co-founding Magic Eden.

Zhuoxun Yin, COO

Source: Magic Eden

Zhuoxun has been full time in crypto since 2017 as the second employee at dYdX and as a Senior Product Manager at Coinbase. Before entering the crypto rabbit hole, he spent the early part of his career in strategy at early-stage companies and advising corporate clients at Bain & Company.

Zhuojie Zhou (Rex), Chief Engineer

Source: Magic Eden

Rex started his crypto journey with crypto mining around 2014. He was an Early Engineer at Uber, Checkr, and recently was a Staff Engineer at Facebook AI working on PyTorch Dev Infra before co-founding Magic Eden. He is deeply passionate about the open-source developer community and has created Flagr, OpenMock, Open Privacy Vault and DSRHub. Rex also serves as one of the Kong API Gateway community champions.

Solana NFTs Are Gaining In Popularity

Trends show that more users are migrating to the Solana blockchain given lower fees and fast transaction confirmations. In 2021 many Ethereum users experienced high network congestion due to the NFT trading frenzy. Ethereum mainnet is built to handle about 15 transactions per second, while Solana is capable of handling over 60,000 transactions per second currently.

Gas fees on Ethereum are significantly higher than Solana as well. During 2021 gas fees to mint and send NFTs went to several hundred dollars. These high fees priced out many NFT collectors from transacting. High gas fees have led NFT creators and NFT collectors to migrate to Solana and Polygon.

Many high-value NFT collections such CryptoPunks, Bored Ape Yacht Club BAYC, and Beeple are listed on Ethereum, so the the average transaction price tends to be higher on Ethereum NFT marketplaces when compared to Solana NFT marketplaces. This gap should narrow as more high-end NFT creators move to Solana.

Popular Solana NFT marketplaces include Magic Eden, Solanart, Solsea. OpenSea announced its expansion to Solana earlier this year as well.

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Resources

Data from charts above