Building an NFT Paradise
Lessons from Magic Eden
Over the last 12 months, NFTs have exploded in popularity and have gone from an obscure little niche to one of the biggest use cases for cryptocurrencies and blockchain.
In the beginning, NFTs were mostly an “ETH thing” with the majority of trading volume coming from the Ethereum mainnet and the Ronin sidechain. In July 2021 these two networks accounted for more than 90% of all NFT volume.
The first major challenge to this “monopoly” came in autumn 2021 from Solana, which to this day remains the biggest competitor to Ethereum NFTs with a market share of ~12%.
The success of the Solana NFT ecosystem can largely be attributed to the success of the Magic Eden (ME) marketplace, which was launched on September 17, 2021, and since has become synonymous with SOL NFTs. As of Q2 2022, it is responsible for 90-98% of daily secondary NFT volume on the network, even after Ethereum’s OpenSea added support for Solana in April this year.
So how did Magic Eden help build an NFT ecosystem that rivals Ethereum’s and what lessons can we learn from it?
Transparency and Quality Assurance
Similar to many other NFT marketplaces, ME also offers a platform for new projects to launch their NFTs on. It, however, puts a large focus on vetting its applicants as only about 3% of collections get accepted.
Magic Eden makes information about previous mints and their conditions, team, roadmap, and projects easily available for launchpad participants to decide about participating.
Supporting Projects and Artists
Launching a successful NFT collection is hard and that’s why Magic Eden offers both technical and marketing support for its launchpad projects, as well as access to the creative community and collobarative network. Partners like the Raydium DEX can also power their marketplaces with Magic Eden’s tech under the hood.
This lowers a barrier to entry even for those with limited or no experience in web3 and allows creators to focus more on shipping the actual product rather than on technicalities.
User Experience and Making Discovery Easier
Magic Eden makes it as easy as possible to navigate its marketplace, discover new collections and search for desired pieces. Besides the usual trait-based filters for each collection, users can also use combinations of volume, floor price and other stats to search for collections they might be interested in.
It also maintains a calendar of all upcoming mints not just for their launchpad, but for the whole Solana ecosystem to make it easier to track what’s going on in rest of the ecosystem.
Onboarding and Protecting
Making the first steps in web3 is hard. New users often get lost in the complexities and even end up falling for scams and losing money. Magic Eden’s Playbook serves as a great introduction to NFTs on Solana walking users through the process of setting up a cryptocurrency wallet and buying and selling their tokens.
Their Content Hub regularly publishes not only ecosystem news and insights, but also general pieces on security, investing and NFT fundamentals.
Always Shipping
NFT space grows at a mind-blowing pace, and even dominating marketplaces can’t become complacent, that’s why Magic Eden keeps bringing new features even in market downturns.
In March-May alone they’ve integrated rarity rankings, launched Eden Games, added bulk listing and buying, created a stats page for collections and much more.
A large focus is put on making the platform easy to navigate on both mobile devices and PC. UI and UX are often overlooked in web3 and improving them removes one of the main hurdles to onboarding the next generation of users.
What now?
Even if you are not a fan of Solana or Magic Eden in particular it is hard to deny the positive influence they had on the NFT space and the innovation they’ve brought.
Even though Avalanche has traditionally been a more popular DeFi chain than Solana it lacks a proper NFT ecosystem and could immensely benefit from a marketplace like ME, something that:
Maintains high-quality standards
Onboards new users and creators
Makes navigating collections and discovering new gems easy
Helps users make informed decisions and cares about their security
Improves constantly and keeps up with innovation in web3
Ethereum is the King and Magic Eden so far is the only protocol which has managed to at least get close. Avalanche has great technology behind it and a great community of developers and users. With the right approach and a proper marketplace at the centre of the ecosystem, there is no reason why in time it can’t become the next NFT paradise and challenge both Solana and Ethereum for their crowns.