Magic Eden will reward loyal traders with discounts, free NFTs

Magic Eden, the biggest Solana NFT marketplace by sales volume, today announced a rewards initiative that will provide its frequent traders with special benefits, including fee discounts and free NFTs.

The Magic Eden Rewards program, which starts later this afternoon, spans five tiers of rewards, with users earning points towards the program based on how much Solana (SOL) they’ve spent on the market. Each step up the ladder brings greater benefits, the company said, including deeper discounts and access to NFT rewards.

For traders who have been using multiple Solana wallets to trade NFTs on the platform, they can connect them all to a single Magic Eden account to maximize reward considerations, rather than having each account based solely on a single wallet.

Magic Eden said rewards will include things like “loot boxes” from NFT projects, NFT gifts and discounts. The program is described as a way for NFT creators to reach Magic Eden’s large user base, making it a marketing opportunity for projects while also potentially further entrenching the marketplace as a leader in the Solana area.

“As a marketplace, we’ve tried hard to deliver innovation that goes beyond the purely transactional layer,” CEO Jack Lu said in a release. “Magic Eden Rewards gives us ways to celebrate and engage our community in new ways.”

The rewards initiative also ties into an upcoming shift in the way Magic Eden handles its own marketplace fees. Until recently, Magic Eden took a 2% cut from all secondary sales, although it temporarily waived the fee from mid-October when it implemented the divisive decision to makes royalty fees optional for merchants.

Magic Eden will continue to waive this platform fee until the end of 2022, and in January will launch a new “dynamic maker/taker model” for platform fees. Essentially, the model would split fees between buyers and sellers, rather than allowing the firm to take a cut only from sellers.

Under this new model, the split will be determined in part by the loyalty reward level of the users logging into an account, as well as the type of transaction being played. Listing of NFTs and bids for listed NFTs are considered “maker” transactions under this model, the company said, while buying an NFT or sold immediately via a collective offer is a “taker” transaction.

Decrypt asked Magic Eden for further details on the fee split for members, as well as how the fee structure will work for users purchasing an NFT via a wallet without a registered account. Decrypt also asked what data is collected and displayed to the public when multiple wallets are paired to an account, but did not immediately receive answers to these questions.

Magic Eden was valued at $1.6 billion in June when it raised a $130 million Series B round. It has dominated the Solana NFT space since its launch in late 2021 and has extended to Ethereum sincewith support for Polygon—The Ethereum Scaling Network — up next.

The marketplace lost significant market shares in a short time this fall when competing marketplaces emerged that didn’t require traders to pay creator royalty fees, typically a 5% to 10% cut of the selling price. However, Magic Eden regained its market leading share after following and make creator fees optional for users.