On April’s Fools this year, we spent 15 min on Canva mocking up a potential Ethereum UI for Magic Eden. Our community was riveted. Ecstatic, even. Some called us out. Some thought it was real. Mutual internet laughter ensued. We carried on but the community’s response to our ETH entry joke continued to sit with us.
What if we went to ETH? To be honest, we hadn’t made that decision yet, but the response crystallized our beliefs that our future was multi-chain. The community had spoken.
Today, we announce our entry into Ethereum. This time it’s not a joke. You read that right, we’re for real. We came to this decision after much careful consideration and many long nights at the drawing board. In this post, we share our reasons behind why and how we plan on entering the Ethereum NFT market.
🪄Our goal: mass adoption of NFTs
From jpegs of monkes to animated in-game characters, NFTs have evolved as a technology with boundless potential. For creators, it’s a radical way to create value, amplify subcultures, and bypass traditional industry gatekeepers. For collectors, they’re a powerful vehicle for expression and connection.
When we first started Magic Eden, we wanted to ship the best product possible on Solana. In 10 months, we’ve accomplished more than our wildest dreams, including over $2B in cumulative trade volume, representing over 90% of all Solana NFT trades. We serve as the home for over 10,000 collections, have launched 300+ projects on our Launchpad, and grown to over 100 team members around the world. We’ve built a gaming vertical and launched over 60 gaming projects, and are partnering with many more to power their in-game marketplaces. We also recently closed a $130M round, to further accelerate our growth across the NFT ecosystem.
This was made possible by all the Solana creators and collectors who placed their trust in us. From the bottom of our hearts, thank you.
Our love for NFTs created a deep desire and long-run mission: mass adoption. We want to bring NFTs to people’s everyday life and onboard the next billion users to the blockchain. To do that, we want to cover the ecosystem at large, regardless of chains. Ethereum paved the way for NFTs, period. Ethereum is still the dominant chain by volume for NFTs. There are many vibrant NFT communities built on ETH that all of us collectively admire.
While we don’t expect to stop at two chains, our team decided to enter ETH as the next stop on our journey. Why? We believe we can add value. There are things that can be done to improve the experience for ETH creators and collectors, and there is more that we can do to engage and bring the community closer together. As we journey into ETH, we also understand that we won’t always have the right answer right away, but we will continue our ethos of always listening to the community and improving from their feedback.
🪄 Journeying through ETH: our roadmap
In comparison to other chains, the Ethereum NFT ecosystem is mature. But, there’s always room for improvement. We’ve identified several pain points. And we believe that we can address them and drastically scale the size of the community.
Challenge: Today, creators and collectors still need to do too much on Ethereum to launch collections and trade NFTs.
This should be simple.
For NFT launches, creators have to stand up their mints from scratch. They also have to find third party platforms to facilitate their whitelist collection. All this takes away from creators being able to stay focused on their art and community. On secondaries, collectors need to work across a fragmented set of Chrome plug-ins and analytics tools to make basic trading decisions, preventing many people from becoming collectors.
Solution: Offer both creators and collectors the support needed across the end-to-end user journey.
We will provide the single, best destination for both NFT creators and collectors. For creators, we will provide the support necessary to launch new collections and grow communities. For collectors, we will provide the best-in-class user experience to discover, own, and trade NFTs.
Our ETH Roadmap: A phased approach
We will take a phased approach to adding new offerings for Ethereum.
Phase 1: Discover and trade ETH collections
The first phase will allow ME users to discover and trade ETH collections on the secondary market.
- Magic Eden List: We are debuting a free whitelist and raffle tool right on ME, supporting both SOL and ETH collections. Creators can easily reach their audiences and plan launches seamlessly. This will be live by 8/3. Creators can go to our Creator Hub to apply to be on the drop calendar and create a whitelist.
- Drop Calendar: We know NFT enthusiasts love drop calendars, and we don’t think a holistic one exists on ETH. It’s an obvious win to everyone to see all upcoming launches on ETH.
Any ETH creators will be able to apply to show up on our ETH drop calendar by registering here.
- Buying SOL NFTs with ETH: In the coming week, we’ll add functionality where users can purchase SOL NFTs with ETH, with credit card to come after.
- ETH private beta: We are releasing our ETH private beta in the upcoming weeks to browse and purchase ETH NFTs with their choice of ETH, SOL, or credit card. Provide us your details if you’d like to join! We’ll choose a selection of folks from the submissions.
Phase 2: Launch new ETH collections
The second phase in mid-August will bring our full-service offerings to new ETH launches.
- Launchpad: We believe the current meta of creators launching from scratch could, and should, change. Creators on ETH confirmed our belief that a Launchpad service would be very welcomed.
We will give the same full-service NFT minting support that launched many top SOL collections for ETH creators. At this time, we’re happy to share that we will be launching EZU, the sister collection from Psychedelics Anonymous as our first ETH collection.
If you’re interested in launching with us, we are actively taking applications here.
Phase 3 & Beyond: More surprises in store!
We are in talks with the top collections on ETH to forge long-term partnerships, whether to build their custom marketplaces, work on co-marketing initiatives together, or something else entirely.
We are committed to continually improving and building awesome new products for the ETH ecosystem. As we learn from what you, our community, tells us, we will deliver on your needs to create a better experience for all NFT creators and collectors.