Introduction

In early 2021, the Non-Fungible Token (NFT) market experienced a massive surge in popularity, with sales volume increasing drastically and prominent celebrities, artists and brands joining the wave. This spike in interest served as a major vehicle for crypto adoption as it onboarded many new users to Web3. In the midst of this NFT explosion, Magic Eden quickly rose to prominence as a leading NFT marketplace.

We at GCR DAO were particularly impressed initially by Magic Eden’s 95%+ market dominance on Solana, unrivaled user experience it provided to both creators and traders, and plans for multi-chain expansion. With that in mind, the DAO reached conviction in taking this asymmetric bet and participated in Magic Eden’s most recent funding round.

What is Magic Eden?

At its core, Magic Eden is a decentralized NFT marketplace where users can mint, buy, sell and trade NFTs. What sets Magic Eden apart from other NFT marketplaces is its defensible moat within the Solana ecosystem, which has lowered barriers to entry for NFTs with its high transaction throughput and low transaction costs.

Founded by a world-class team of CEO Jack Lu, CTO Sidney Zhang, COO Zhuoxun Yin, and Chief Engineer Zhuojie Zhou, the marketplace officially launched in September 2021. The Co-Founders hold extensive experience in product and engineering at major Web2 and Web3 companies, including Uber Eats, Facebook, Google, Coinbase, dYdX, and Checkr. They quickly realized that they were filling a major gap in the industry when they achieved $50,000 in trading volume on Solana within the first 24 hours.

Source: Magic Eden 2022 Recap

For traders and collectors, Magic Eden now offers a seamless NFT purchasing and selling experience on Solana, Ethereum, Polygon, and even Bitcoin. Users can easily discover live projects and whitelist opportunities, filter NFTs by traits, purchase NFTs with traditional payment methods (credit/debit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay), place and accept offers on an entire collection, earn rewards based on activity, and more.

For creators and projects, Magic Eden is the go-to partner for launching collections via its Creator Hub. Vetted and approved projects can maximize the success of their collection launch through the Launchpad program, which provides personalized marketing support and dedicated development assistance for the minting process. Their suite of tools allows non-technical creators to create a whitelist campaign, mint their collections, create a collection page, make updates to their collection and publish announcements. Additionally, they allow projects to leverage Magic Eden’s technology to launch their own white-label NFT marketplaces.

Community-Driven Growth

Magic Eden’s success can be attributed to its unwavering commitment to its community. Unlike many incumbents, the team truly embodies the ethos of decentralization by prioritizing feedback from its actual users, rather than solely making decisions in a centralized manner. As a result, the team rapidly and continuously refines their platform to meet the demands of its dedicated community members.

Through its grassroots community-building approach, the platform boasts 22M+ unique monthly visitors, 100K+ daily wallet connections, 440K+ Twitter followers and 168K+ Discord members. The team actively engages with the community by providing transparent updates, soliciting feedback, and rewarding active users with prizes and discounts. They even launched the Magic DAO to amplify the voices of its dedicated community members – DAO members can vote on which projects to feature on the homepage, gain access to exclusive events and benefits, participate in hackathons to develop toolings, and partake in many other perks to come.

Source: DappRadar

The Hub for Gaming

Understanding that gaming will be a catalyst for onboarding the next wave of users to Web3, Magic Eden is a strong advocate for gaming and is emerging as a leading Web3 gaming hub, launching strategic partnerships with major titles and studios such as Boomland, Intella X, Amihan Entertainment, and Azra Games. They aim to be a key player in Web3 gaming by providing discoverability of games to users, white-glove launchpad services, white-label NFT marketplaces, high liquidity for in-game NFT assets, a content hub for all things gaming, game-specific listing pages with relevant content, and the ability to play the game on the listing page.

The team’s dedication to Web3 gaming is evident in the recent hiring of Chris Akhavan as Chief Gaming Officer and Tony Zhao as Head of Gaming Investments for Magic Eden Ventures. Chris is a veteran in the gaming industry with experiences at Glub Mobile, Tapjoy, Forte, and Game7. Magic Ventures is the venture arm of Magic Eden focusing on investing in high-quality Web3 games and gaming infrastructure. Since its inception in July 2022, Magic Eden Ventures has invested in 11 game studios.

Source: PRNewswire

GCR x Magic Eden

GCR DAO is thrilled to have invested in Magic Eden for their Series B round in 2022, alongside Greylock Partners, Electric Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Paradigm, Sequoia Capital, and others.

We invested in Magic Eden because of the team’s success in fostering a robust community and tenacious demonstration of swiftly delivering new features based on user feedback. With their strong positioning in the gaming vertical, we believe they will also establish themselves as the fulcrum of Web3 gaming. They are one of the hungriest teams we have ever come across and we have confidence in their ability to execute their ambitious vision.

Learn more about Magic Eden:

[This article has been written and prepared by the GCR Research Team, a group of dedicated professionals with extensive knowledge and expertise in their field. Committed to staying current with industry developments and providing accurate and valuable information, GlobalCoinResearch.com is a trusted source for insightful news, research and analysis.]

Disclaimer: Investing carries with it inherent risks, including but not limited to technical, operational and human errors, as well as platform failures. The content provided is purely for educational purposes and should not be considered as financial advice. The authors of this content are not professional or licensed financial advisors and the views expressed are their own and do not represent the opinions of any organization they may be affiliated with.

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