Multiple chain NFT marketplace Magical Eden puts more focus on their original home on Solanaand today the firm announced a The “Chapter II” initiative which will see Magic Eden further open up its platform in various ways – even giving traders free SOL for buying and selling NFTs.
Magic Eden has begun aggregating listings from competing marketplaces, providing traders with a single destination to manage listings across platforms and view prices and listings across the Solana NFT market. The startup – which was valued at $1.6 billion from June 2022 – said it will also open-source its smart contract to the market in the coming days.
Furthermore, the company will also remove a “co-sign” feature that prevented its own marketplace listings from being easily aggregated by other NFT marketplaces.
These traits address longstanding criticisms by Magic Eden, which has consistently been the leading Solana NFT marketplace since its launch in late 2021. Rival platforms and other Solana builders have taken Magic Eden to task for using closed source code and to limit cross-platform composition capabilities.
However, it remains unclear whether Magic Eden will still use an escrow contract that holds users’ listed NFTs – a leading criticism of Magic Eden’s marketplace model that has previously been called out by rivals as a potential security threat. Decrypt asked a Magic Eden representative for clarification, but did not immediately hear back.
As part of the relaunch, Magic Eden will temporarily change its “producer fee” to -0.25% for certain types of transactions. In other words, Magic Eden will pay you to buy and sell NFTs.
If you list an NFT for 100 SOL, wrote Magic Eden as an example, you will end up with 100.25 SOL if it sells. Similarly, if you make a fundraising offer on a particular Solana NFT project and it is fulfilled, you will effectively receive a 0.25% discount on the purchase price. Users can also earn fees for operating Automated Market Maker (AMM) NFT trading pools on Magic Eden.
Magic Eden’s move comes amid the rise of a rival called Tensor, which has taken a leading share of Solana NFT’s market share at certain points over the past few weeks. Tensor offers a reward model similar to Blur, the leader Ethereum NFT marketplace.
Market data from Tiexo shows Magic Eden with an edge over the past week, with nearly 44% of trading volume compared to about 40% for Tensor. Over the past 24 hours, however, Magic Eden has taken a heavier share of 51% of the Solana NFT market compared to about 35% for Tensor.
Amid the market turmoil, Tensor developers criticized Magic Eden for its co-signing requirement, renewing arguments some rivals made last year when Magic Eden was dominant. Although Magic Eden expanded to other chains such as Ethereum, Polygonand Bitcoin over the past few months, the firm recently said it would return the main focus to Solana.
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