Magic Eden | The Community-Centric Marketplace

Absolutely, I can jump in on that. And thanks Mike for having us, awesome to partner with you and super grateful to be here. So Magic Eden, we want to be the biggest and most good NFT marketplace in the world, right? And we want to be the leading destination when folks think about collecting, trading, discovering NFTs. And for us to get there, we started off on the Solana blockchain where the low cost and the transaction generally, its ability to enable really polished product experiences was really nice and really differentiated. But our vision is to go much broader than that, and we want to be the biggest place and the leading destination for our users.

So we've got four co-founders from Magic Eden: myself, Zed, Sid, and Rex. Two of us came from the crypto exchange background. Zed worked at Coinbase and dYdX, the leading centralized exchange and also one of the leading decentralized exchanges, right? And then I worked at FTX, so we really came from that kind of crypto native exchange background. And then our two other co-founders on the technical side, Sid and Rex, they were really early Uber engineers. So we had a really unique mix of consumer marketplace experience and crypto exchange experience. And when we think back and look at it, NFT marketplaces, the business model itself is actually very similar to a crypto exchange, right? There's secondary trading, primary issuance, that kind of stuff. But the app itself and the software itself looks like a consumer marketplace exchange. And I think that combination of skills and that kind of origination of our skill set really helps us figure out who we want to be and have really strong intuitions about what we wanted to build. I think a lot of us had been thinking about starting something for quite some time, and the confluence of factors was: number one, NFT growth very clearly was taking off in 2021, and we saw PFPs kind of just break through the sound barrier, right? And sort of large auctioned one-of-one pieces of digital artwork as well. Two is, you know, Jack got a front-row seat to the growth of Solana through being at FTX, and we really started to feel the possibilities of NFTs being much more than just profile pictures. Not that that category is going away, but really the future here is many, many, many different types of assets and many different more use cases to come. And then yeah, our general feeling that NFTs would be a much, much larger market was driven, I think, a lot from the fact that if we can help enable a whole bunch of these use cases going forward, then NFTs should really be at the forefront of a cultural, social, super fun experience, right? More than just being a pure commerce kind of layer. And that's, I think, what people think about NFT marketplaces today. And we felt like the best place to start that was nine months ago, and here we are. So it's been an amazing journey since.