Magic Eden's Contrarian Strategy to NFT Trading | Zhuoxun Yin

Transcript

because if you think about it we already made the contrarian decision to start the company on salana which at the time was very much not where a lot of the nft activity actually was right the majority like 90% was actually on ethereum even just from the outset that we are not like dogmatically you know aligning with like this chain or that chain it's more just like where do we think some of the um new and exciting uh use case experimentation is going to happen uh and we should just be there for that because as a platform we should be Gnostic to all of that wh te up with the Wormhole Foundation stewards of the Wormhole protocol the leading interoperability platform powering Crossing transfers for 200 plus multi-chain teams came your unique worm NFD just for zero X research listeners

today pair is an Innovative pair trading exchange built on top of Simo users can trade trending narratives with one click from Blue Chip narratives such as long BTC short e right through the whiff versus Bonk the Hat stays on Sim's intense Centric architecture enables deep liquidity source offchain and Broad onchain and combined with pair has democratized access to complex trading strategies typically reserved for institutional Traders Avalanche is a smart contract platform that has a novel consensus protocol subnet infrastructure and the hyper SDK toolkit which allows web free developers to easily launch custom powerful blockchain Solutions you can start building today by checking out the before we get into today's episode

just a quick disclaimer the views F on this podcast by either myself or any guests are their personal views and do not represent the views of any Associated organization nothing in this episode should be construed or relied upon as Financial technical tax legal or other advice all right let's jump into the episode what's up everyone and welcome back to another episode of zerox research we have a fantastic episode lined up today as we're joined by Zed the co-founder and CEO of magic Eden today is Monday May 13th but this episode will go live in just over two weeks on Thursday May 30th as a reminder you can use code 0x ZX research 10 for 10% off your block Works research subscription thank you for coming on Z hey thanks for having me guys nice to nice to see you

both um before we get started do you want to give a short introduction on Magic Eden and you guys what you guys have built yeah for sure so magic Eden we've been around since um September 2021 uh feels like a lot longer than that but it's only been two and a half years but we're uh uh cross chain nft Marketplace um so we support uh nft Marketplace on um I think five yeah five chains now so ethereum salana Bitcoin base um and polygon and more recently we've also become a multi-product company in that um as part of building out this cross chain experience we've realized that

there's a lot of gaps and limitations to the ultimate user experience that you can offer to uh to people who were coming to the product and which is kind of what brought us down the path of building a also a cross chain wallet uh which is the magic Eden wallet um so yeah it's been a pretty interesting journey across many many nft ecosystems ups and downs of nfts and they now expanding Beyond uh Beyond nfts as well so happy to dive in and and talk about any of any of the above perfect um I think just to kick us off I want to ask you guys about shift towards the Bitcoin ecosystem a few months back I'm not sure exactly how long ago but kind of want to understand

like your decision process behind this and how you guys decided to approach this yeah great question it's funny because I feel like more people know about us for Bitcoin than or at least it feels that way than for anything else which is kind of crazy um because it's a relatively new part of our business um so it I'll go back with just a little bit more background and then um I'll share about the specific Bitcoin decision but very very early on in the company maybe about three or four months in we always knew we would become a multi-chain uh company and we just didn't exactly know how that would play out but we we had that uh pretty clear idea in our heads because if you think about it we already made the contrarian

decision to start the company on salana which at the time was very much not where a lot of the nft activity actually was right the majority like 90% was actually on ethereum and um so that that kind of shows a little bit about um maybe like what our mentality is um even just from the outset that we are not like dogmatically you know aligning with like this chain or that chain it's more just like where do we think some of the um new and exciting uh use case experimentation is going to happen uh and we should just be there for that because as a platform we should be agnostic to all of that um but if you would ask me when we start the company do do you would I have thought

we' be building on bitcoin I would have absolutely said no with probably a lot of conviction um because I just didn't think it was possible right there was not really a way to do it so with that background when um the ordinal protocol did come out in the beginning of 2023 so yeah a little over a year ago it it definitely peaked our interest immediately because um I mean there were many many ways to read it but our reading of it was that oh for the first time you could build a something very very similar to nfts uh on bitcoin and it would be a way for users to basically

stack their Bitcoin um which obviously people want to do right uh that's kind of how we've seen a lot of the uptake in many of the other ecosystems whether it's trading fungible tokens or trading nfts earning yield like all this kind of stuff right so it opens up that whole whole world and it it didn't take us long to actually get conviction on the idea I think it to probably took us end to end about two weeks to get our head around like this is something we should do mainly for the fact that we felt like if people were interested in those kinds of use cases on a chain like ethereum there's there's no reason why that also would not be true for Bitcoin um so this

was early 23 we made the call took us about 3 four weeks to kind of get started on on on building this and um from beginning idea conception to launch um yeah probably about a month and um yeah the rest is history so I would kind of call it like it's funny people now sort of frame it as like a yo we totally changed the company to become a Bitcoin company it's definitely not like that uh but Bitcoin for sure has been a really exciting ecosystem and it's become obviously a much larger part of magic eaten but it's definitely just one of the big steps along our um journey to become a cross chain um cross chain company were there any like additional challenges uh with launching support for

Bitcoin versus like any other particular like say evm chain or even salana I'm just curious about you know given that it's a utxo model versus a ledger based system I'm curious if there's just any other pain points uh that kind of came up in the Bitcoin process when indexing ordinals dude so there was so many problems yeah yeah I mean I can't I can't even count it's like yeah too many to to even mention but number one yeah it was it probably took us um number one like a week or two just of scoping just to see if it was possible to build a Marketplace like that in and of itself we were like not even sure if that was possible it ended up being uh yeah my co-founder Rex he he ended up just spending a bunch of time to do the

diligence and he came back and was like yeah I think the answer is yes I think but we got to do some work here and that was even before we even built the thing um and then yeah a lot of the work that we had put in to enable nfts on Solana and ethereum it was not totally transferable on the especially on the back end because of EX exactly this like the utxo model right indexing was totally different um there wasn't even really a standard of how to index we kind of we were making it up along with other people in the ecosystem around like a canonical way to do that um there were not even things like the concept of a collection didn't even exist on chain which you take for

granted like these things on salana and ethereum um and then now I'll give you another example of like just ux challenges now it's like when you people are trading things like runes you have to account for the utxo model because it's things are not exactly fungible right because of the way the the utxo uh thing works so how do you then have to do you enable people to split utxos like how do you do that so there's all these like Downstream ux implications let alone like just building the right system to enable the expansion uh super challenging um and now like one of the things we've done to to to mitigate and like at least um come to resolution on a lot of this is we actually have built

now like a full stack Bitcoin team so not not just like um you know back in engineering like it's like a whole engineering team around Bitcoin it's a whole operations team around Bitcoin so that you know the operations team and support team can read like Bitcoin transactions which are really different to read versus other chains there's a uh BD and marketing team so it's kind of like we've now built up a lot of that muscle but in the beginning it was really really hard because um we did not have a lot of the internal like deep Bitcoin knowledge we we we had to kind of like learn it uh so which makes this whole thing even more crazy because um yeah it's like a full stack bet that you have to internalize and at the time it's very hard to put your mind and wrap

your head around like how many things you actually have to do when you build a a new Marketplace people kind of just think it's like yo snap your fingers like turn on the Chain you're good to go it's it's it's really it's a lot more than that so um yeah we've had to think about a lot of this since since then too many examples man I'm like getting getting PTSD just thinking about it yeah that's funny it was a bit of a leading question I spend a lot of my time in onchain data and started got my start in the evm world on ethereum then started you know messing around with salana and then started touching Bitcoin data uh so I I I know the trials and tribulations all too well but one other followup I had there is you mentioned runes and so you know you spend all this

time you're indexing ordinals that's all based around this one type of protocol uh and then someone's goes on and builds runes which is supposed to be somewhat of an improvement in some ways on on the ordinal style of thing of creation and and really leaning towards a more fungible uh what looks like a fungible token you know I personally have my doubts on whether or not it really feels like a fungible token uh but I'm curious so basically the point here is there's one standard you build around and now there's like a new one you're like okay so now we you know you guys have integrated Rune support um presumably there'll be another one in the future would be my assumption based on this pattern and I'm curious like how do you think about having to continuously build support around uh these New Primitives that come up and like the challenges

there versus something like uh I guess even ethereum nfts have kind of gone through some Evolution over time but maybe at a bit slower Pace yeah dude this is actually a really good really good point because um I could name many many examples on all the chains actually where this is happening um and in some ways I think this is the reason why it's like you got to be crazy to build an nft Marketplace because it's like you got to deal with all of this like I'll give you some examples okay on bitcoin it's like orinal uh even before runes there was blc2 and then now there's now there's runes and there's actually many more there was like BLC 420 and BLC whatever there was like all these random ones um on Solana there's like

you know pfts token 22 um yeah there's many there's so many of them um and then on on ether as well so it is really hard because you actually um the goal actually the perfect world is actually that people just um kind of rally around A single standard as much as possible because then you can just build it once and that takes care of that indexing layer and then everything else you can just kind of like yeah it right from there when you have to then add many many of these standards yeah it changes it definitely changes the kind of infrastructure you need to have um on bitcoin for example we we actually did

build bc20 initially uh we have since stopped supporting it because we just as a team we just didn't have the resources to actually support everything uh so we kind of took that out and then we ended up doing runes instead because we think runes is actually an upgraded um you know fundable uh um standard and and I I accept your your comment about like fundable is not really fully fundable right it's kind of like it is somewhere in between because because of the utxo model it's like they're more like trading bundles of fungible tokens um rather than true fungible tokens but it's like a step in the right direction I think um and yeah a lot of this complexity I think it's it's multifaceted it's kind of like we have

to do some thinking and internalization about should we or shouldn't we support these things which is more of like a strategic question and then there's a secondary execution question of like okay if we're going to do it like how do we actually do it and how do we actually maintain it because the cost isn't so much uh can we just do it once it's like you got to you got to continuously maintain indexing uh otherwise yeah otherwise you can fall behind pretty quickly um so we've done that through a combination of uh building it inh house but also partnering with with um third part who can help with powering some of this infastructure uh so as an example on evm we we work with the third party who can help us because what we want to

get in the business of is how do we enable rapid chain expansion because there's so many evm chains right and it's like largely similar not not exactly but largely similar um so indexing I think over time will probably become fairly commoditized whereas something like Bitcoin it is so new and it is so complicated there is some moat to be had by actually building that stuff in house and making it first class right I think the same is true still to some degree on salana although over time I think it will also become more or less like taken care of um so yeah anyway like not the same approach for all the chains is the short short of it I think

um uh but on bitcoin we have we have done it like fully inh housee I have um I want to ask about a bit about building on bitcoin um the first thing is that it feels kind of like uh ethereum and Solon for example they just naturally lend themselves out to some of like nfds for example but on bitcoin uh especially with runes there's a lot more pressure on the app player where you have to kind of deal with some of these things as opposed to on the evm and svm it naturally comes how do you guys approach that like how much do you want you said you want to build most of these things out in house because it's like important and strategic but how does let's say like the community work

the building Community work around that like are there other builders where like we're going to focus on splitting utxos and then you guys can exclusively focus on marketplaces or are you as magic trying to let's say bring that all under one app yeah yeah it's uh this is exactly the exercise that that that uh we've gone through a few times now on bitcoin um and I'll I'll give you guys a real example of something we talk through as a team just to give people a bit of insight into some of the sausage making behind the scenes which by the way is not always very pretty um but for runes yeah there because it was so new like the thing was going live on harving

day and no one it's like not as if you could build it and then test it you know because it's it's the thing itself is not even live so it's like kind of a weird it's probably one of the weirdest launches that I've ever been a part of uh because usually you kind of build things in a way that's like you it's like iterative you go into beta and then you like make sure that everything works and then yeah and then you kind of release from there so there was definitely a question of like what should we actually build and it's like do you want to build the trading experience do you want to build the etching and minting experience do you want to build the discovery experience um Do you want to build splitting like there's all like basically that entire like these set

surfaces right and I actually will just Yeah we actually were originally going to build the discovery experience first because we were not like that confident that we could build an actual trading experience for day one because it was so like time compressed um and eventually we figured out that we could probably build the trading experience so we ended up building that first um and to answer the original question of like do we want to just do everything the yeah I think the answer is is definitely not because there's two there's actually two much to to build and um I'll give you an example of one of the things we we we did in the early stages was we because we were not going to build minting and etching on runes we decided to work with uh a

couple of Partners on that uh so if you see on Magic Eden today there is like a a mint like a minting runes button that takes you to luminex for example um and and like luminex has been an amazing platform to like just discover all the things that are like in progress um and then they have a link back to Magic heeden for like post Min like trading um these runes right which is which is great because that allows us to focus on making the trading experience really really good which there's there's just like more than enough to do um right now and uh um and we can continue to work on like how do you bring more of the minting volume and everything towards magic Eden like yeah over over time but uh super happy to be to be

working with others on that and and my broad philosophy on it is that even if you look at nft ecosystems just on other chains yeah there's so there's actually so much depth that goes into it right there's like all of these platforms products that focus on various parts of that chain it's like yo you need someone who's G to do pre-sales someone's G to do like whiteless tools someone's gonna do like analytics someone's going to do nft Marketplace over time maybe there's some convergence and cons Val but I think it doesn't really make sense to do it at the very very beginning or like the early stage of when an ecosystem is getting built out um so right now on bitcoin it's like yeah it makes a ton of

sense for us to just like focus on a couple of lanes do them exceedingly well and then hopefully the users like it and we can start to build more and more from there but um yeah I think that's sort of how we think about it it's a it's like a trade-off wormo is the leading interoperability platform for multi-chain Bridges and applications with over 1 billion messages sent and 40 billion in value transferred wormo leads the industry in Cross chain message volume and total value transferred if you're a builder wormo has an extensive sued of tools and infrastructure to securely build multi-chain applications you can use worold to power D5 nfts governance and so much more and Wormhole supports over 30 blockchains and six different run times clber unique Wormhole NFD just for zerox research

listeners today F out of form prove that you've listened to today's episode to receive a PO app and you'll get an email over the coming weeks to claim you're limited Edition nft pair is an Innovative pair trading exchange built on top of Simo users can trade trending narratives with one click from Blue Chip narratives such as long BTC short e right through the whiff versus Bonk the Hat stays on Sim's intense Centric architecture enables deep liquidity source offchain and Broad onchain and combined with pair has democratized access to complex trading strategies typically reserved for institutional Traders the age of interoperability is here with the launch of teleporter Avalanche becomes a seamlessly linked network of many sovereign blockchains

that communicate so smoothly they feel like a single chain teleporter is an evm compatible cross-chain communication protocol built on top of avalanche forp message it allows any evm chain on Avalanche to send messages assets and data to one another in a simple fast affordable and secure way teleporter and avaline cor messaging provide a new foundation for how Avalanche blockchains can communicate and how developers can easily build cross chain applications out of the box build anything you want any way you want on the eco-friendly blockchain designed for web 3 de check it out by clicking the link below so you mentioned something pretty interesting around there's might be a little bit of a moat on say salana or Bitcoin where doing a lot of this groundwork uh is

still really really challenging versus the evm side of things where she's been become more commoditized for one reason or another and if I look at I pulled up um nft ps.org here and it's just like a breakdown of volumes by chain and then marketplaces on those chains and Magic Eden has done 55% of volume on salana over the last month and 78% for Bitcoin um versus you know much lower percentages when you look at like something like ethereum main net polygon or base or three evm chains and so I'm curious do you think that plays a role um in kind of why you guys are doing outperforming relative uh on on salana and Bitcoin relative to the evm chains or is that just more broader reflection

of your business decision to focus on bitcoin and salana oh good question um I think on I don't know if it's either of those reasons um I think that yeah it's sort of it's like it's multi it's like multifaceted in that there's definitely some element of this that is like a um what what is what is like the unique what is Magic's unique ability to to penetrate in each of these markets right and um if you look at the history of of um of magic Eden and where we've done well it's we've done really really well when we've entered markets

that basically have a lot of like it's like high velocity of activity which kind of that what drove a lot of the act like our salana business basically in the early days even even till now um and we we through that we developed a lot of like brand recognition as being the the main sort of place the main venue to access salana nfts and I think that's also true for Bitcoin where we we were pretty early right we weren't I think I don't think we were the first one very first we were maybe like yeah the second or third we were there very early and and then I think we also built a lot of infrastructure for the whole ecosystem like open sourced a bunch of us stuff and I think that actually probably has

more to do with it it's sort of like entering the ecosystem at the right time and then and then having the right like product and like uh shipping velocity to then match the ecosystem such that you develop that brand recognition and and I I think that on evm um we've generally been very very late entrance um that's true I think for all of those chains actually eth Bas and polygon um and but but I think that's actually okay because I think that the way that I see um and the enery market as a whole sort of evolving and our place in it is that it is kind of unnatural in in some ways for for a

Marketplace to have like 90 80% of the market um because at the end of the day it's like it is basically open liquidity right across um across across across everyone because it's all onchain and and therefore I think the the real mode is just over time as more and more assets and and value is kind of split across many many chains you kind of want to be the the layer that is able to aggregate as much of that as possible such that all of the inventory just becomes available and therefore you know you might just want it might work out that maybe you're like 30% of all the markets but um but that actually is massive because because like it becomes

such a like fragmented space over many many many chains um and we we'll start to see less Trend towards like one one player becoming like 90% I think that's already becoming generally more and more true uh on definitely on evm and then I think probably over time on the other ones too um so yeah I think even though it's sort of quite a different profile we kind of look at it at an aggregate level across all of the all of the ecosystems and that's sort of the drive and and motivation for us to to then add as many ecosystems as possible what are um I mean as you mentioned you guys were really I don't think you were the first I think there

were like two marketplaces before you but when you entered Bitcoin I feel like was the right time to enter Bitcoin because before it was just way too difficult to use and like you guys shipped a proper product especially under magic eeden name it was um like I think it was a good entry what are some other let's say evm or nonm chains that you guys are looking to expand into or do you see any other of these because you kind talked about fragmentation of liquidity across multiple chains how do you see like magic eeden approach that you said you want to be a layer but what are some I guess like over the next six to 12 months where do you see magic eating expanding more into yeah definitely um yeah so I don't think

we'll we're going to be able to expand like to every single uh every single chain um but I think definitely we will be adding yeah quite a few more uh through to the end of the year yeah the exact ones TBD I think that we doing like a lot of diligence and and kind of scoping it out but I think a few that were keeping an eye on for sure um are some of the other um evm l1s that's a that's like a definitely um and I I include like the parallel EVMS as part of that right so like it's like yeah Avalanche like say monad like and maybe the latter two are kind of more um like yeah mad towards the end of the year

right um given given their timeline um and then yeah keeping an eye on like a bunch of the l2s I think in general there hasn't been as much activity in l2s um at least that's yeah from what we've observed um obviously a lot on a bunch on blast sort of like incentivized volume that's happening on blast at the moment um but other than that I think very we're seeing relatively little um and and there's also a pretty interesting set of Bitcoin l2s that are coming to Market um I I used l2s generously as well as as a ter for Bitcoin uh they're not they're not like true native Bitcoin l2s but they are like yeah it's kind of like what polygon

was to ethereum right before there were like true optimistic rollups and things like that um so keeping an eye on that like I was just in Bitcoin Asia the last four or five days and that was a huge massive theme of that entire week um people pretty excited about just yeah some of the experimentation on l2s so I think that's another area where we keeping a pretty close eye on with regard to bitcoin l2s I assume that those will be easier to integrate with than it is with the Bitcoin main chain right because that like those building on top of them the developers are ensuring that they have more compatibility than Bitcoin does yeah yeah a lot of them are actually um going

the route of like M compatibility um so it kind of you know this like oversimplification but kind of just adding another evm chain um so yeah so so we'll see but there are also different approaches like uh some some are yeah trying to use like other Technologies as well um but for the most part I would say most of them are generally taking some kind of evm approach um so yeah tldr is like just more chance which is kind of crazy it's like it's like we don't I know if we need a lot more but that's what we're getting so that's the world we're entering into and you mentioned doing due diligence on these chains before you

launch on them could you kind of walk through what you guys consider as a Marketplace before you launch on a new chain yeah it's a mix of both uh technical diligence in the sense of like we want to get a really strong and robust technical understanding of how the works not not just for our own Comfort but also if if we can see if there's any like um technical Innovation that we can bring to the table as a result right uh salana is like the perfect example where we wanted to build it on salana originally because because it was really fast and cheap right so then we thought we could actually build a different a different nft experience to what was was

available on on ethereum L1 um and same as for Bitcoin it's like super slow and expensive it's like the opposite but at the same time you can build stuff that's really different there um because because it's inscriptions and all of that right so that's the first thing we sort of really deeply understand um the what's technically possible because then that drives the user experience that you can end up building then the second part of it is more like um this is I guess more applicable to um um chains and ecosystems that are that are like live which is what what is actually happening there like what is our point of view on um where we think this chain is going to go um because when we add Chains It's not

just like we add it as like something in the code and then onto the website it's like we mob like what I was saying before about Bitcoin we mobilized like a whole team like set of people around it and you know for example on bitcoin we we built not only the marketplace then then we invested in building like a ordinal launch pad to then help um projects and creators launch on bitcoin and for us to enter the market with a strategy like that it's like you have to believe them that like creators will want to come and do this so so why do they want to come and do it why why do they want to do that over say launching it on any of the existing chains today like what's in it for them right and you

have to we have to have like conviction around that answer and maybe the answer is different and it's like some other way we think the chain can grow but I think we have to um we we do the diligence to get conviction on that before we go launch there because we know that the opportunity cost of launching there and then nothing happening which isn't always totally in our control that's a pretty big opportunity cost because we could be working on many many other things in the company um but I think that's basically the two things Technical and then like ecosystem uh getting a view on like how bullish is everyone on this chain what's the activity who are the users who are the creators will other use cases emerge like that kind of

stuff yeah it makes sense that there's a bit of like a qualitative and quantitative aspect to weighing that out and I'm curious how this parlays into your new wallet um you know launch the launch of the wallet is relatively recent and starting to get some great traction and as I I've actually used it it feels good it's comfortable uh it's been a great ux for me personally and I'm just curious how like all right so how do you think about the the bifurcation between the wallet and and the actual like web product right or the marketplace like if you're going to add support for one where you always add support for the for the other or these sort of like two independent products that are growing both under the magic eating umbrella but kind of at their own speeds yeah dude that's a great question

so because it's good because it's something we've been actually talking about quite a lot internally recently um so let me answer it kind of in two parts the first is um why did maybe I'll share a bit about like why we built the wallet and then the second part I'll answer kind of like how it ties with the marketplace all all that so so the the thesis behind us building this wallet was because as we were launching all these chains we were actually uh we kind of discovered a problem that yeah that we I guess we always knew about but we didn't fully like like Brock the extent of it which was as a user and you come to Magic Eden and you want to suddenly use Bitcoin

like trade ordinals it's like oh I've been using I don't know metamask or something right previously and now now I have to go go get a new wallet to do this thing which is another layer of friction right and then I have to go get Bitcoin I have to like do something with my exchange or like and then trade and then send the Bitcoin over so end to end it's kind of like man that's probably going to take like for forever you know it's going to take hours at least it's quite a lot I'm laughing here because this is exactly my story with how I started using the magic yeah same with me I remember when I first bought my first orderin I was like oh that was

terrible I can't believe we're like getting our users to go through this like this is awful so um anyway then we realized that that that is not a Bitcoin only thing that's kind of a general problem like say we went and added like I don't know say or something it's like yeah magic eeden users go have to go get another wallet now to be able to do stuff so that that problem basically compounds so it's like say you add you know n Chains It's always like you know n minus one or something of like wallets that you have to have users have to have okay so that was a fundamental problem we were trying to solve so then we thought okay cool let's build this multi-chain wallet so users

don't have to go through that experience and uh let's also make it a core core use case within the wallet that users can go between the assets very seamlessly such that if you were a user on eth or Soul or something and you suddenly now want um ordinals you can swap Soul or eth to bitcoin and then get going straight away to circumvent the whole like let me go like go through an exchange and then send the money back like super convoluted um so that was that's the underlying rationale and it's been amazing to see the uptake so far so I appreciate you Dan like using the wallet it's like very

happy to hear that it's it's it's it's meeting the the need um but it's been really cool to see um over half a million people uh download the wallet uh so far it's only been out like two and a half months and um and the line share of activity is actually uh ex do people doing EX exactly that it's like going between Bitcoin and and and ether Soul right as a core core use case so it's really really cool okay and then to answer the second part like the the the actual question uh here around like how do we then see it with the marketplace and stuff so they are two independent products in the sense of they should not be reliant on each other to like grow or like uh

scale and that's a really important um fundamental concept because as a wallet you have to be credibly independent right it's like the wallet cannot just only do magic eeden stuff otherwise like it's not that not useful we have to maximize the usefulness of this wallet for people so therefore it should do much much more than just magic Eden stuff um and then conversely it's like yeah for the marketplace we cannot only just support magic Eden wallet because a lot of users we know also use other wallets it's like it's chill so they are run independently in that sense where I think there is some connectivity is if we can um uh utilize the fact that we are building both to then create

something that is an excellent experience and that is basically uh there like kind of two main elements there one is like if we can create like really nice seamless nft use cases in the wallet like imagine like yeah minting imagine like open additions and claims and all these kinds of things uh all the stuff that you you like and use for nfts in the wallet and then also the cross chain swapping to enable access to new ecosystems right like that enhances the mag Heen experience for sure but it's not only just for magic he it just generally is a really good for for cross chain stuff um so I think it's very likely over yeah over if we play this

out that the wallet will end up supporting a bunch of chains that the marketplace will not right uh at least they won't go exactly hand in hand um and I think that's that's to be expected uh but we will be finding ways to like Drive really nice experiences um for chains where they both are supported uh because because yeah there's some like delightful things you can do once once we are we can connect some of the core like nft and and trading use cases uh between the two so more to come on that front but uh the first step here is just get it out with some of these core chains and get people like minimizing the effort and and friction to go

between them and I think so far it's been been doing doing uh doing amazing yeah I love the approach there and and to go deeper on specifically the wallet side I just want to get your take around crypto ux as a whole right so crypto is great and they provide you the optionality of self- custody and truly owning your assets but I have to imagine that the average nft Trader probably doesn't want the like if you of the spectrum of like maxing out your security versus maxing out your ux my gut which just could be totally wrong but my gut would be most people probably want to maximize the ux and their trading experience and so when just even like the thought of you know managing a private key and having to like log in with this one

password and if I forget it I better hope I wrote down my my seed phrase correctly and all like all the steps that are required in self- custody and I'm just curious how you think about that because I could imagine a world where we have some like lot like a I don't know like maximum Securities setting on your wallet like sort of like when you go on a UI you press like Advance mode right that's when I can like get my private key and all that but the reverse of that is where I just log in with a password email and a password or whatever it may be and like I can just log into my wallet I don't have these like clunky hex strings of addresses or or private keys or like basically trying to maximize the Simplicity and Abstract away all of the complexity uh for the

user and does that resonate at all with you or there something you're trying to do or think is is valuable I'm just curious like what you think the user uh the magic Eden wallet user would want yeah definitely so um I actually fully yeah pretty much agree with everything that you just said and uh I'll I'll let me share as well like how this manifests in um some of the decisions we've made like and and maybe how we think about the future so today we don't really like us as a product and a company we don't go after normies right like at all and by Normie I mean like yeah like I don't know like my my dad or something you know who's like not definitely not like

doesn't have a wallet you know like doesn't doesn't even have Bitcoin we're not going after any of those kinds of users it's like coinbase is going after those users right that that's like that's good and the reason we don't go after them is because yeah that that Journey even if we wanted to say reach them which we probably could we could you know do some like ads and a bunch of others like marketing to get people into the top top of the funnel but even if we wanted to do that we we wouldn't because yeah that onboarding journey is just too messed up it's like too complicated you have to basically be motivated already to come down this journey and uh yeah so for that reason we don't even focus on that

segment of users so I really actually agree with what you were saying about I I don't know if these are these are actually my words of describing it's kind of like a graduation path where there is some like very seamless um like a social login experience to create like an account create a profile which maybe has a wallet behind the scenes that the user doesn't really know about um and get them using magic Eden and a bunch of the stuff that we have and then once they are doing like enough transactions or they've hit some amount of value in their wallet then it makes sense for them to be like yo you're sufficiently kind of

down this Rabbit Hole you like go get go download like The Magic eeden Mobile Wallet now which is purely non-custodial right and then start using that instead and um that that I think is basically the journey that we want to get to um whereas today we are we are at yeah we're we're not even at step one in that when you come to Magic Eden you have to bring your own wallet right there's no social login type of experience and then even if we had that there's no way to then link it to like a a non-custodial wallet so all these things I think are very very possible to do so um that's what makes me pretty excited to uh continue down this path because we

already have like pretty interesting exciting content and like stuff to do on Magic heeden like lots and lots of users are hitting the page every day I do feel that like many many more people will will want to experience it so once we get some of these things built it should become way easier like 10x easier for for people to to get experience some of the fun um within magic Eden uh but this is like a very iterative process it's kind of like step one building that uh cross chain wallet step two some of this like social login stuff step three is like how do you then bind all that together to like create that graduation path so users can uh no matter what segment they're in they can kind of come in at any stage of

that Journey perfect um yeah I agree with both of you I I'm I I like the idea of a graduation path and I feel like they there's there have been attempts at building some form of um cour work for crypto where you just move on move on move on but it hasn't been done quite like effectively enough um one question that I had for you guys on the more on the nft marketplace side is that recently at least over the past say year um I feel like there's been kind of a shift in what nft marketplaces look like um specifically that the new newly launched nft marketplaces have more of a

trading ux like almost as um similar to what a Perpetual Futures product would look like you guys have have not launched this um at least as far as I know what's the like is that something that you guys are planning on launching and I guess more broadly I kind of want to ask about how you view this um shift like because when I view magic Eden like you said uh Solana is very fast and Bitcoin is very slow so I feel like magic Eden in itself is very suitable for Bitcoin because it doesn't have necessarily a trading setup um how do you view that is that something that you guys are

considering like maybe you're going to launch a trading interface for salana but on bitcoin you'll keep the classic look what do you think yeah I think the answer here is actually more based on um what does the future look like for the actual assets like what kinds of assets are these you know which I I actually don't really have an answer on it because it's like hard to put a stake in the ground but what I will say is that uh over the last six once I I definitely think there's more blurring um between nfts and like tokens right in that now now yeah that's obvious through like

404s but also more obvious as like a as like meme coin trading has really picked up right um so to the degree that that Trend continues yeah I do think it's valid to to basically um explore more of these like trading related experiences um and I I would say that magic Eden is like we're like somewhat already on that Journey uh just not maybe not as explicitly as maybe some might think and I'll give you two examples of that one is like we we built runes trading uh which already is not like definitely not like a full-on like

Autobook exchange yet but if you look at it it's like some very very very very MVP version of like an order book because that table that we have on runes is effectively just here are all of the orders that people are willing to sell at right so that's number one and then number two is that in our wallet you can already swap between various fundable tokens and um I think that'll continue to become a bigger part of Mag Eden over time um are we interested in building like like prot trading kind of stuff um probably not for the sake of it because I think our core user at the end

of the day is like we want to serve retail users so I think that if that's like the underlying like foundational philosophy um then we probably will not be going down to the nth degree of building like a bunch of really professional trading tools like we're not going to build like perpetuals trading or something like that that's like way too you know too Pro but would we build like more um more tools that allow for retail traders to trade and that give them like more signals and and um uh help them make better decisions when they trade yeah that that that is conceivable

because we think the retail audience can be very very massive right whereas the pro audience is like relatively small um so yeah I don't know if that fully fully answered your your question but to sum it up I think it's like what are the asset types um we are already somewhat building some stuff that more resembles like uh fundable trading and we're definitely interested in it um but a lot of this is going to be a gradual Evolution um so long as that the assets themselves are moving in that direction if they continue to be like I don't know like gaming nft items then then it's kind of a different story right but I think it's a little hard right now to put a stake in the ground around what those assets will

be no that makes sense um kind of related to this do you guys have any or actually I just like to hear your thoughts on nft finance or like nft f i feel like it was a big thing last year or maybe a year and a half ago and everyone was like nft Finance gonna be the big thing this year we had ERC 404s SPL 22s a bunch of stuff on salana and then now it feels like all of it is just not discussed as much what do you think of like I guess launching borrowing or lending through magic e or amm pool which you guys have right yeah yeah um no I I think N5 is still really really interesting and still has like

massive potential actually um I think that probably what you are describing about like some of the stuff being like less hot right now versus what it used to be I think that's just a general um it's like a sign of the times in that right now nfts are no one's really even talking about nfts that much I think um there's we've seen more people just talking about ordinals and runes than just nfts in general right as an example uh and definitely mem coins have been really dominating the the Mind share over the nfts um but I think this is just normal it's like kind of a natural cycle kind of thing um I mean we also go through

periods where no one talks about like fungible tokens as well uh you know I remember between like 2018 and 2019 like basically nobody was launching any kind of token so the this this is like very natural evolution in the market but if um we do see more like the next cycle of like nft spot trading gets another run then I would say 100% uh definitely we will see nft fi also um make another run um because in order for nft fire to really like have a credible Market you need the spot Market to you know be robust that's true for any kind of market right uh true for fundes too so

um we we have seen probably from an N nft 5 perspective most of it has actually we've seen a lot of it actually on bitcoin recently just because ordinals went through a massive run there was tons of people uh borrowing against their nfts um their ordinals sorry um and it's probably going to heat up in the other ecosystems too and we we built amms on Solano um so you can kind of use amm pool like deposit into amm pools for nft collections on Soul um and we've actually explored Bor lend on on salana as well partnering with with some other people so you never say never but I think uh the core Focus for us I think

would would still be the trading experience no I think that makes sense there as well one of the interesting points you mentioned was uh how no one's talking about nfts right now and that kind of brings up the nature of cycles and how there has been this bit of like a boom and bust in nfts in terms of like attention and price action uh when you compare even just last cycle to this cycle how do you think about what's next for nfts and like do they break out of this cyclical natur nature or is that just like a a fundamental part of crypto as a whole impossible question as boring as this answer sounds I just man I just think it's a fundamental thing in crypto it's kind of like uh uh somewhat

personally I'm like desensitized to it all now after so seven years of of like doing doing this in some in some ways I do think nft is is definitely like even more cyclical right because because at the end of the day yeah it is like uh yeah they are like inherently inherently speculative in some sense um I do think that there will be that this will continue over time um and we'll continue to see sort of like ups and downs in the nft market but it what is true I think is that the Catalyst each time is going to be different um and that's why I think it's pretty cool we like what we're seeing

now with like yeah the last six months like orinal and runes and then what we're seeing now is like a lot of people excited about um like like um some like new new ways to use NFS like this like trading card um fantasy top game right it's like it's slightly like a definitely a Twist on how nfts have been used and traded which is definitely a really interesting Catalyst there will be many many more catalysts um but just given the nature of yeah these are just these are assets that are tradeable so that just markets that go up and down uh I just think that we're just in for more Cycles uh for us like it doesn't really impact the way we make decisions or um

how we prioritize things because as I said before like we just want to be the platform that's relatively agnostic right it's like just be the best place that people can trade these assets that get created in the same way that yeah like coinbase should just be the place where any type of token can just be bought or sold against USD that's like their core Core Business I think that's kind of true for us as well except um you know anything sort of like onchain value we want to be part of that right like any kind of onchain value no matter what the asset type we should be a the sort of the the fundamental place where people can can access that and discover that so um yeah just you know up up up

down just just down for it you know just just just ready perfect um Z do you have any parting thoughts for listeners what does magic Eden look like in let's say six months to a year is there anything that you would want them to specifically look into that they would that they should look that they should do I maybe I this may be a little bit of alpha for your users it's like um I think the best surface that they should check out over the next six months is definitely the wallet because there's a lot there's a lot more coming yeah a lot more coming that I think people will be pretty delighted about so um if you're going to

pick one thing to do on Magic Eden if you're not already on Magic Eden it's uh you should you should download The Magic Wallet perfect thank you very much for coming on yeah thanks for having me guys appreciate it yeah been a pleasure of Cheers we have teed up with the wormo foundation stewards of the wormo protocol the leading interop platform powering Crossing transfers for over 200 plus multi-chain dabs Wormhole isn't just a bridge it's the leading interoperability platform for multi-chain applications so go and claim your unique Wormhole nfts just for zerox research listeners today hit the link in the description to fill out a form and to prove that you've listened to today's episode and receive a p app you get an

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