Magic Eden創辦人：沒有比現在更好的時機！你還來得及致富！【邦妮區塊鏈】

I'll tell you a little bit about my life. Actually, my life before Magic Eden was deeply tied with crypto, and a lot of my co-founders as well. We've all been friends for a long time. Basically, the story was I grew up in China, moved to Australia when I was very young in primary school, and that's where I grew up. In high school, that's actually where I met our technical co-founder, our CTO Sid. We went to high school together, we went to math tutoring together on the weekend. That's where we first met. So we've known each other since we were like 15. What happened was during college, Sid and I were hanging out and we're really into startups, so we would try different ideas. One thing that Sid did was around 2014 when we first graduated from college, that was when the first Bitcoin bull market was happening. He said, 'You know what, I want to do this crypto thing because not a lot of people are doing it.' So he actually started a Bitcoin company in 2014, raised some money, and moved to the US. Because he was one of my best friends, I was very inspired. He said, 'Hey, you know what, you should come to the US and maybe you should join my company.' So I went to Boston to check out what he was doing, and then I said, 'Hey dude, I don't know that much about business, I don't know that much about building software, but I definitely know your business is not going to work.' That's basically what I told him. And then I said, 'Dude, I can't jump into this. I'm sorry, I have to go back to Australia and find a real job, a quote-unquote real job.' But what happened was, it was a good move in some ways because his business went down in flames a few months later. From that moment on, this was 2014, that's when I started learning about Bitcoin and started learning about crypto. I thought it was really fascinating, and it was so OG. At that time, crypto was not on Twitter, it was on bitcoin.org, these old school forums. I went back to Australia, and long story short, I joined a big consulting company in Australia, then they sent me to the US, sent me to San Francisco in the Bay Area. I changed jobs to get into tech, do product management. But what ultimately happened was almost at every point in my life or in my career at that point where I had the opportunity to change jobs, I thought about joining crypto because I thought about this experience I had with Sid where he was asking me to join crypto. So when I came first to the US, I thought, 'Oh, maybe I should join a crypto company.' Then I moved to Google and I was switching between different teams at Google, and I thought, 'Man, maybe I should join a crypto company.' But each time I felt like I also had some fear. I was like, 'Oh, this feels super weird. Is this going to survive? What's the state of technology?' So I didn't jump in. I just mostly dabbled in playing with tokens and playing with coins and buying coins and stuff. But ultimately, it was in 2021 where there was this huge NFT boom, right? And I thought, 'Actually, this feels like a consumer moment for crypto. It's no longer talking about hardcore trading, it's no longer talking about really complicated financial terms for the everyday person to understand, like staking, consensus algorithm, this kind of stuff. No, it's no longer really talking about deep infrastructure like which chain is faster. NFTs was more about partying, culture, games, talking on the internet.' To me, that's what consumer is. It's what the everyday person finds interesting. It's funny, it's entertaining, it's something that you can relate to. 2021, that's when I thought, 'Hey, maybe there's something here. We should do something.' Then I called Sid back and he was not doing crypto anymore, and I said, 'Hey man, let's do round two. You started a crypto company in the 2014 bull cycle, but this time there could be something real.' So that's how we basically got the company started.

I think there were a couple of things. Because of the story of seeing one of my really close friends starting a company in crypto in 2014, I already had this thought of, 'Hey, I want to do something.' Why didn't I want to jump into crypto before this? I always felt like I did not have an edge. I felt that most of crypto's history has been either about hyper-financialization, so hardcore trading, or it's been about deep infrastructure. Hardcore trading is like people who worked on Wall Street, built exchanges, built trading shops. Those people could have outsized success. And hardcore infra is like, 'Oh, if you have a PhD in computer science, you worked on distributed systems, then you could build the next chain.' And most people have outsized success. But most of my career has been in consumer internet, like UI/UX, building delightful experiences, how to build things with millions of users. And I always felt like, 'Well, I have nothing to contribute to this space because that's not what this space values.' But what happened was in 2021, effectively there was the rise of Solana, fast chains, there was the rise of consumer use cases like NFTs, culture, games, art. That's when I thought, 'Hey, this is a unique moment where I could actually contribute something.' And at that time also, I felt that I guess it was in COVID, right? During COVID, I don't know, a lot of people started thinking about what they're really into. And I had a similar feeling. My similar feeling was I got a lot of good logos on my resume, but I didn't feel like I was doing something for myself. And ultimately, when I was at Google, I felt like, 'Man, I have nothing left to prove. I worked on a bunch of these products, a lot of the products scaled to billions of dollars in revenue. I thought, 'I don't need to collect any more CV credentials. Actually do something for myself.' So all of this basically came full circle together.

So I think the key thing is about thinking long term, having a lot of conviction in the thing that you're building, and then telling yourself that nothing is ever as bad as it seems and nothing is ever as good as it seems, keeping a level head. I'll tell you two stories. I think one is Solana going from $250 to $8 and then having three near-death experiences, but us knowing Raj and Anatoly pretty well and seeing them having so much conviction, having so much calm through that when the whole world did not believe them. I think that's actually a very inspirational story, and that energy is something that we try to embody within Magic Eden as well. And then in Magic Eden, we had the same mirror basically, because when Solana was $250 and they dropped to $8, we saw our revenue drop 99%. It almost meant that nothing we did at Magic Eden mattered because the SOL price was so low. And at that time, I think one of the best things that we did for Magic Eden is to expand cross-chain. So we went to Polygon, ETH, Bitcoin, and became one of the only crypto projects to have a lot of traction in different ecosystems. And at that time during the bear market, everyone was saying this is crazy. And now, Magic Eden in 2024, we've had our best year ever, our most profitable year. But it's because of those high-conviction bets that we made when it was really, really down. So I think all of that is saying we love this high-conviction energy from Solana, and we also try to embody that at Magic Eden. It's also helped us.

This is something we say at Magic Eden from really early, like month one at Magic Eden. We tell the whole team: nothing is ever as bad as it seems and nothing is ever as good as it seems. In fact, I just told my team two weeks ago we had a company offsite, and I said exactly the same thing because it's a bull market, things are going to go crazy. And what that really means is when things are really good, like bull market, you feel like you're the master of the universe. It's actually not like that, and we should pair ourselves down and be more humble and be more level-headed. But in the bear market, as you say, when SOL is at $8, we should also tell ourselves nothing is ever as bad as it seems. If you're building something fundamental, focus on the inputs, then you know the output will prove itself. That's the thing that we've been telling our team from month one, very early on. And I think it's really important. How can you have conviction? The only way to have conviction is to say, 'Hey, when we did really, really well, we should also recognize it was a healthy dose of luck. We work really hard, but someone the universe was looking out for us as well, so we should be humble. And then when things are really bad, we should also tell ourselves, but fundamentally, the team did not drop 99%. The product that we built did not drop 99%. Our talent did not drop 99%. So we should still have belief within ourselves about the strategy and the mission that we are on.' So yeah, that's something that we've been telling ourselves for a very long time.

I don't think we wrote a business plan as well. We had a vision. Maybe a couple of things. I would say there is no silver bullets, there's only lead bullets. What I mean by that is there's no one single thing, you just have to do a lot of small things. How did we raise money? I think the core of it is we were executing really well from all these small things leading up to it, and that gave us the credibility to raise. It wasn't an amazing sales pitch or an amazing PowerPoint deck or anything, but it was more a testament to a lot of the execution that we did leading up to that point. And it wasn't just me, it was the whole team. I cannot take full credit by any means. I only contribute a small part. It was more that our whole team contributed to the success, and the success then led us to be able to raise that much. I think the second thing is that having a long-term thesis and long-term mission is really important. And this is something that is very much related to the thing I said earlier: think long term, nothing is ever as good as it seems, nothing is ever as bad as it seems. This is something that we had very early. But crypto as an industry is very short-term. People just build products for a year, a few months, print the token, get rich, and then leave. And what we have always wanted to do at Magic Eden is to outline some long-term thesis. So the same story for us was we believe in a multi-chain world. We believe in a multi-chain world, therefore we are going to be a multi-chain marketplace, and therefore we are going to build a team that can do this. And we have a thesis about why multi-chain is the way, because we want to onboard casual users, and those casual users really value convenience, one single place to see everything. And I think that spirit of having a thesis really early on, having the thesis of multi-chain, but then sticking with it, and of course the execution that led up to it, that's what gave us credibility to do that stuff. But as I said, it was no one single silver bullet, but just a lot of lead bullets along the way.

I've had someone ask me that a couple of times recently. So I think my short answer is no, but I'll give it in a few different layers. Number one, how we see NFTs is NFTs is just a technology, and creators use that technology to build use cases on top of it. And then there's use cases like PFP, music, gaming, tickets, etc. That's how we see NFTs. And the relationship with meme coins is this: I think in every technology, there is a speculative use case. So just like NFTs can be used for speculation for PFPs, fungible tokens like ERC-20s, SPLs can also be used for speculation. And meme coins is effectively speculation based on fungible tokens, and PFPs is some element of speculation based on NFT technology. But how I see the space evolving is, if you take fungible tokens, eventually multiple use cases exist. There is the speculation use case, then there's utility use case, then there's other things. And you could see that before, right? In 2017 when ICOs were really hot, it was basically speculation. But eventually, some tokens with utility like Solana rose to the top, and those things became massive. I think for NFTs, it's going to be the same. There is this speculative aspect, like PFPs and so on and so forth, but then we will also see other categories rise as well which use the technology for utility use cases. So that's basically how I see the relationship. So I don't think meme coins is NFT 2.0 because that's using a use case to explain the technology. But I think definitely both things can have some speculative aspect, and those things will continue to live, and that's a part of just being crypto.

To me, the story of NFTs for this cycle is even if NFTs is still pretty moderate, even if it's much lower than the last bull market, I still have a lot of belief that Magic Eden is going to do really well because of the strategies that we put in and because of the product that we built. So I think that's the first thing. The second thing is that we have this core part of our product which is doing profile photos, ordinals, BTC, this kind of thing, but we are also seeing some really interesting new categories as well. So one of the categories that we've always been really hot for NFTs is gaming. And this cycle, with now I think we're seeing some new games that are really leading up to the dream that we had before. So there is Off the Grid, which is built on Avalanche, and we're going to do a partnership with them. That one basically has five million users, number one on the Epic Game Store. People don't really know it's crypto, but that thing is going to print millions of NFTs. And of course, we would like to be the commerce layer for those. I think it just needs a few hits for that to bring it to life. So that's the second thing. And I think the third thing for us is Magic Eden, our business, after we adopt the ME token for example, it's really going to the next chapter. And what we want to be and what we're going to look like is an on-chain version of Binance, where we can trade multiple different types of categories of assets, but it's all decentralized and it's all on-chain. So for that today, fungible trading is already 20% of our business, so it's already pretty big and it's only going to grow bigger. So I think for this cycle, it doesn't really matter to us whether NFTs comes back this cycle or not. But I think for us, we're always going to have a platform and a business that's going to be able to ride multiple different waves.

Yes, we added BRC-20. But I think for Bitcoin fungible tokens, probably what we're more known for is Runes, which is the newer version of BRC-20s.

There's a very true part of your question, which is it's very dangerous to spread yourself too thin. We think about it as mission versus opportunity. And generally, we try to put our mind as 70% mission, 30% opportunity. And of course, it's not a hard and fast rule, I'm not measuring it with a tape rule. It's just to convey a spirit. The spirit of it means this: crypto is very fast moving, everything is changing all at the same time. We have to have a long-term vision and a long-term mission for what we are building. For example, the first chapter of Magic Eden is to become the number one cross-chain NFT marketplace, which we did, and we have 60-70% market share in terms of revenue within NFTs. The next chapter of Magic Eden in terms of long-term mission is to become on-chain Binance, trade multiple assets across multiple categories, all chains, all assets. That's our long-term mission. And we put the vast majority of our effort, let's say 70%, towards that mission. And we have to build a product, we have a vision for what the product looks like. But 30% opportunity is like, well, we should always keep an open mind. So the 30% of keeping an open mind is, as you say, how Bitcoin happened, how Runes happened, how ordinals happened, because we saw things in the ecosystem and we were like, 'Oh, we're very interested in doing that, and then we should actually take a side quest to do this really well.' So that is what mission-opportunity means. Then to your question of not spreading yourself thin, the other thing that we tell ourselves is whatever we build, we try to build best in class. We would like to be the best product for that category for what we are trying to do. We don't want to build half-ass things, basically, to put that simply. So therefore, if we actually decide to take a bet and it's a side quest, ultimately the way we think about it is we have to resource that accordingly. We have to put a team that's really passionate about it, they're happy to dig at it, grind at it for a long time to ultimately build something that's really good.

A question about motivation. So I tell them, 'Hey, crypto is feast and famine, right? Sometimes you eat really well and sometimes it feels really, really bad. It feels like you're crazy for working in this industry. So why do you want to work in crypto, and what gives you the motivation to keep going when times are really bad?' And usually, we want to hire people not because people are joining Magic Eden because the times are good, but we want to hire people because you'll still be here when times are really bad as well, and you'll have conviction to stick through. So that's my number one question.

I wouldn't say where the market plays with the most volume, right? But I also think that volume is a vanity metric. It's very easy to be gained. And that's why we chose revenue and users as our metrics. And I would say Magic Eden is the number one platform by users and number one platform by revenue.