Magic Eden, the OpenSea Killer?
Since the launch of Ethereum in 2015, the world of blockchain and cryptocurrency has been growing at an unprecedented rate. One of the most exciting aspects of this growth has been the development of NFTs. Which arguably is the single biggest onboarding use case for blockchain use and crypto.
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, are digital assets that are unique and cannot be interchangeable i.e. immutable. This makes them perfect for collectibles, gaming items, event tickets, community development, and curated user experiences. As the demand for NFTs increased, they needed a home to be shown, listed, traded and sold. Enter OpenSea.
Founded in late 2017 by Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah. The company is headquartered in New York and has raised 100’s of millions of dollars from notable investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Management, and Y Combinator.
OpenSea is now the world’s largest marketplace for digital goods. The online platform supports the buying, selling, and trading of a wide variety of digital assets, including crypto collectibles, in-game items, and metaverse land plots to name a few.
No competition, no progress — Bela Karoly
Since the mass adoption of OpenSea as the defacto platform for volume & trading, there have been a few to step into the arena and attempt to claim their slice of the pie such as LooksRare, Rarible, and Gem. Today we are going to focus on one competitor that recently announced multi-chain support, Magic Ethen…oops, I mean Magic Eden.
Magic Eden, which launched in September of ’21 has seen meteoric growth as it has taken over the number 1 marketplace spot on the Solana chain—claiming over 90% of secondary trading volume and $2B in total trade volume in 10 months. Beating out incumbent marketplaces like Solanart and Solsea who have been around since 2017.
Magic Eden has slowly been catching the eye of ETH users with the successful launch of Okay Bears a record-shattering mint and project that at the time of writing this article has racked up over 1,95M+ SOL ($70M USD) in secondary volume. Even more recently the launch of Primates with its fresh art style & clothing brand vision has been appealing to BAYC holders looking to “ape” into Solana.
The timing of Magic Eden adding support for ETH is quite interesting as well. With OpenSea rolling out beta support for Solana & phantom wallet in April ‘22.
The speculative hype within Solana communities was at an all-time high with projects seeing 20–50% floor price increases. The anticipation that ETH liquidity would just come flowing in was peak hysteria. In reality, it ended up being a lot like this.
As such floor prices reset to fair market value, the hype faded away and that sweet ETH liquidity did not come flooding in. Why will it be different now that Magic Eden is supporting ETH projects? In my own humble opinion, I believe that Magic Eden does two things exponentially better than OpenSea.
One, Magic Eden is deeply woven into the social fabric of Solana. They actively participate in Spaces, engage with their community, and take feedback/address it publicly.
Secondly, Magic Eden iterates at an incredible pace. The amount of features they released is dizzying. Some of the huge features they rolled are launchpad, bulk purchasing, bulk listing, simple & pro analytics, and 3rd party rarity integration just to name a few.
By comparison, it feels that OpenSea moves at an incredibly slow pace and is very out of touch with the community. Rarely do you see them actively engaging in the discourse on CT (crypto Twitter), and it comes across to me at least like they are happy being the well-fed giant.
Granted, just like when OpenSea added support for Solana, I am purely speculating on the potential outcome for Magic Eden. At the end of the day, this is a volume game and OpenSea has a massive moat built around itself. It will take quite a bit for Magic Eden to dethrone the King and only time will tell the end of this story.
Are you bullish on Magic Eden adding support for ETH? Do you think this is just another flash-in-the-pan marketing stunt? Who is Magic Eden? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments below and give us a clap or two.
If you’ve made it this far and have a few more minutes to spare please take a look at our previous articles on Are NFTs dead? and the Top 12 NFT tools we find ourselves & community using day after day.
