Magic Eden CEO: “Very natural” to expand from Solana to Ethereum NFTs

Magic Eden, the leading Solana NFT marketplace, continued his extension to Ethereum today of roll out support for a handful of large collections, incl Bored Ape Yacht Club, Pudgy penguinsand The other side. Additional projects will be added in the days ahead.

The “Magic Ethen” push was announced in August as the first step in Magic Eden’s multi-chain evolution, first revealed in June when the firm announced a $130 million increase to a value of 1.6 billion dollars. Instead of launching its own native Ethereum technology, Magic Eden aggregates listings from other marketplaces and integrates them into its platform.

Jack Lu, co-founder and CEO of Magic Eden, appeared in the latest episode of Decrypt‘s gm podcast. The wide-ranging interview covers a range of topics, including Magic Eden’s own rapid ascent – it launched just one year ago this month – amid a fleeting wider NFT the market, plus the value Lu sees in NFTs across different use cases.

According to Lu, it was Magic Eden’s plan from the start to go multi-chain, dating back to the earliest pitch decks to investors. However, the company chose to start with Solana, which he said was “seen as a frontier ecosystem” last year. Magic Eden quickly leapfrogged the small, existing Solana marketplaces and became the dominant player in that market.

When it came time to announce Ethereum support in August, Lu admitted that the Magic Eden team was “worried about” the reaction of its passionate SOL-centric audience. However, he does not believe that the markets are as divided as they may seem on the surface.

“There are actually very high degrees of user overlap between the two ecosystems,” Lu told gm co-hosts Daniel Roberts and Stephen Graves. “It’s not that mutually exclusive strain. At first that’s what I thought too – it’s just like SOL, just ETH. But actually, as we dug [in] more to learn about it, in fact many of the SOL users came from Ethereum.”

Lu said that many of the early Solana NFT users had actually come over to the platform after first experimenting on Ethereum. While there are still examples of tribalism among notable collectors in both areas, there are also NFT personalities who have played in both areas.

“For us to move from SOL to ETH, it was actually very natural,” Lu said. “A lot of these users said, ‘Oh yeah, well, I have a MetaMask [wallet] already, I already know a little about the landscape. It makes sense that a Solana marketplace would also want to move to Ethereum.’

As for why Magic Eden expanded to Ethereum, there is an obvious answer: it is the largest ecosystem in terms of total trading volume, and has the most projects with the highest value. There are also probably many users who have only ever collected Ethereum NFTs. But Lu also pointed to “things that we’ve long admired” in the Ethereum space.

“There are some very important user motivations,” he explained. “There are amazing NFT communities, NFT collections and NFT creators and culture in the Ethereum ecosystem.”

Lu said that by expanding across multiple NFT ecosystems — with Ethereum the first of potentially many additions to come — both Magic Eden and the broader Solana NFT space can learn from Ethereum’s NFT culture, and even “port over some of these learnings.”

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