Ep. 559 The World of Magic Eden’s NFT Marketplace

Ep. 559 The World of Magic Eden’s NFT Marketplace
August 15, 2023 #CRYPTO101

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In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Zhuoxun Yin of Magic Eden which is a decentralized marketplace for peer-to-peer trading of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Magic Eden is a leading trading platform for users to mint, list, and trade NFTs. Initially developed for the Solana blockchain, it has since expanded its offering to include support for Ethereum and Polygon.

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

 

SPEAKERS

Bryce Paul, Aaron Malone

 

Bryce Paul  00:09

All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 podcast. You guys know what time it is we’re bringing on more legendary builders in the crypto space. Pizza mind. I’m particularly excited for this one and I think anybody at home who’s listening will be too if, particularly if they’re interested in learning about NF T’s. What would you say? Pete’s?

 

Aaron Malone  00:34

I would say there’s going to be a magical episode.

 

Bryce Paul  00:38

Why do you say it’d be so magical?

 

Aaron Malone  00:41

Because we have co founder Joshin from Magic eaten the show today?

 

Bryce Paul  00:46

Damn. Yes, let’s do it. Zed, aka Zed. From magic Eden. How’s it going, man?

 

00:53

Yeah, let’s go. What’s up, guys? Thanks so much for the tee up. No one’s ever done a magical episode before so that’s that’s duck.

 

Bryce Paul  01:01

Yes, we did pizza mines legendary fish ponds. But no, we’re excited man, you guys have been building incredible. Really cross chain NFT tooling and an awesome platform for a year, two years. We want to know the whole founding story. We want you to just kind of tell all. But before we do that, let’s let’s just get acquainted with you. And you know Who who are you and what were you doing really before? Founding magic Eden?

 

01:28

Yeah, for sure. Excited to be on here. So Thanks for Thanks. Thanks for having me. I first got into crypto in about 2017. My background before that was a little bit all over the place. I tell people that I did actually spend about a year of my life in my pre crypto days doing doing mining and people think they automatically assume that that’s kind of some kind of Bitcoin mining or or theory of mining or something. But I was actually working in underground mines. Literally was in like, yeah, a uranium mine for like a year. Wow.

 

Aaron Malone  02:05

Yeah, that’s how your superpowers Okay. Make sense?

 

02:09

Yeah, that’s, you could call it that. But this is back in another lifetime. I was I was I’m from Australia, hence, you know, it kind of makes sense. But I was working in mining at the time I was in a in a consulting firm. They put me there. And then I moved to the US in about 2015. Yeah, generally just been a very inquisitive dude. Like, I just enjoy getting into new technologies. And around that time, when I moved to San Francisco, there’s, there’s no, there’s no shortage of interesting things going on. But one of those things, was lucky enough to kind of come across crypto had a few friends who were working at Coinbase, that sort of 2015 2016 era, and was lucky enough to kind of learn a bit about Bitcoin. And then in 2017, all this stuff started happening on Aetherium. And in many ways, it’s kind of funny, like the 2017, Ico boom, were very analogous to what happened with NF T’s and 21. And that’s when I first got interested, I ended up joining a team dydx as the second employee in 20, late 2017, early 18. So shout out to those guys. Yeah. And the cap.

 

Bryce Paul  03:15

Antonio was on the show recently. Oh, sick.

 

03:19

Yeah, solid, solid guy. And anyway, I spent a few years the lead an absolute ton about what it takes to build in crypto. I mean, we went through, obviously, the cycles, went through various rounds of product iteration. You know, he’s famously known for kind of like throwing away that previous thing and making 10x bets. And I really, really, really admire that. I spent a little bit of time at Coinbase after building institutional products, which is really interesting as well during that was during the time when hedge funds and corporates macro was was really full into Bitcoin. And I left in Yeah, sort of, like mid 21. And we started Majeed and then September 21, and the whole kind of founding story is that we were all you know, DJing on the side, doing our own little thing, right? We were trading at a tease would, you know, obviously part of deep Isola before that. And we started using a bunch of different things on all the chains like I remember I had avalanche wallets, I polygon wallets. I had Solana wallets, we were just kind of using all kinds of things. And there was something magical when we first used was first first like set, it’s a lot of transaction, because was so fast, it was so cheap. And we thought that immediately, if NF T’s are sort of a consumer use case, there must be something that happens on a chain that is much, much more performant. And that was the original thesis and obviously, that played out really well for us, in terms of just like, getting us the amazing initial traction that we had when we first started the company and we felt really confident about it. As a team, because I’ve met myself and I’ve three co founders. Alongside me, the background of team is very much like crypto, there’s a lot of crypto native experience, like Sid started a Bitcoin company in 2012 2013. Jack and I were both both working in crypto before starting magic eating. And then a few of the guys, two of the guys actually were very, very early engineers at UberEATS. So we spent a lot of time building consumer marketplaces. And that was the beginning. We, we fired it up and it went from there.

 

Bryce Paul  05:33

Wow, I love it. And I mean, I think our viewers at home have a lot of questions, but maybe the first one that was on our mind was What were you doing by uranium mines? What was what was going on there? I have to know I’m so curious.

 

05:47

You’re not gonna believe this? Because it’s like so we didn’t ridiculous. But I was like fresh out of college. I joined this consulting firm, and you think like, it’s going to be sexy. You’re gonna go like,

 

Bryce Paul  05:59

yes, certain times. You’re in New York Wall Street offices.

 

06:03

Exactly. Corporate Strategy, whatever it is. Next thing I know they shipped me out to the mines and my job was to help help reduce like the cost of digging up the dirt. I like literally was riding along in the trucks measuring how long it would take to do things. Crazy experience.

 

Aaron Malone  06:26

When you went to college for Yeah,

 

06:28

did study economics and to end up in a uranium mine.

 

Aaron Malone  06:34

Well, you ended up on Solana, which is a pretty rare thing itself. What was it? Well, let’s address the elephant in the room was salam has taken a beating. Yeah, in so many different ways over the past couple of years. Do you still believe in Solana or it is magic even get a branch out to other things? For the sake of survival, not just reach? What gives us the rest for Solana confidence from a developer’s perspective State

 

07:01

of the Union State of the Union? Here we go. I always actually I would very much. Yeah, the universal I think common narrative. Very easy narrative right now is to diss on Solana. And by no means am I like dogmatic about certain things. You know, like when I was a dydx, Saint, actually, it’s the same thing eat went down to 70 bucks in 2018 19. Aaron Malone said IEF was dead at the time too. And there was a certain tribalism that remained there, that really was the foundation of greater things to come. I think the same thing will likely be true for slaughter. It is absolutely still true in parallel, that it’s taken a beating, right in the last six months or so. But that tribal developer community is absolutely still there. And we, we know it, we hear it, they’re very vocal, we experience it every day. But I would say all of the cross chain stuff we’re doing is not, you know, a survival mechanism, so to speak, right? Because, you know, we, as a company, we’re very lucky, we’re well capitalized. A lot of the things that I think you should do in crypto, and I’ve sort of referenced this before with kind of Antonio’s mindset at dydx, you should make big debts. That’s what we’re here for. Right? Make big bets, innovate on on the on top of the people who came before you. And if that means, you know, for us, a lot of what guides us is where do we think the market and for entities but also, all of these use cases that drive NF T’s? Or is that going to be three years, five years, 10 years from now let’s build for that. Because I think, taking too much of a lens into the what the cycle is right now what the mindset is right now. It can be very, very distracting. So yeah, till the State of the Union address is is true, I think slot has taken a beating. But a lot of the reason that people went there in the first place, all that stuff is still true. And if you look at what is the most robust ecosystem outside of EDM, it is definitely Solana. So if someone is going to make a bet on on something outside of EDM, I think that still is the best that for us is a cross chain marketplace, which has been a stated vision of ours for a long time. It will be obviously a focus of ours. There will be many other focuses too, and we can get into it. But yeah, ordinals EDM has so much interesting stuff going on. So we also have longtime conviction on on the soul space, dude. Yeah, like

 

Bryce Paul  09:34

if we actually zoom out to like, what’s behind that conviction in the long term kind of, of this space? Like, what is NF T’s like, you know, explaining to folks like my dad, right, who are like, yeah, like, I don’t I don’t get NF T’s kind of the average guy who’s not in the market. How do you guys kind of explain the value prop of NF T’s broadly?

 

09:55

Yeah, there’s many. There’s so many ways to explain this, but I think at its core or the thing that really resonates with a lot of people is that, ultimately, it’s collectability. But in a much, much more supercharged kind of way. I would like to talk about internally, we kind of referenced this, at least magic eden, in the sense of supporting, yes, supercharging, kind of what digital commerce can look like, right. And I think entities are at the heart of that. Because if you look at many, many kinds of collecting, that happens, even traditionally, whether it’s, you know, baseball cards, or whether it’s like, luxury watches, there’s this fundamental need to either collect something, because that’s just what people like to do. Or it’s, it’s collecting for the, for the focus of being able to say that I own this luxury thing, I own this rare thing. It’s like a flex mechanism, right. And at its core, that’s what entities enable, but they also enable so much more than that, because it is, you know, on chain, and the on chain part for sure is the part that really gets people tied up when you try to explain it to a non crypto native person. But, like to us, a lot of that is, is super, super helpful, because it bakes in all these concepts of like, true ownership. And in so many traditional, I guess methods of transacting or, or, or even owning things, you don’t really get that you don’t get, like the true sense of like property rights. Imagine all of that. But it’s just fully fully digitized, and fully, fully proven. We think that is a really, really amazing innovation. And we haven’t scratched the surface in terms of what things that can be applied to yet. It seems a bit silly that it’s applied to like PFPs today, but these things take time. So we’ll be hopefully at the center of the evolution here.

 

Bryce Paul  12:04

Yeah, so tell us what what magic eaten typically sees trade on its platform, like what are the quality of NF T’s? Like what kind of stuff trades? And like you said, like, you know, as the space evolves, maybe how do you foresee magic eaten changing over over the course of time? Like what kind of assets at trade?

 

12:25

Yeah, so there’s a number of ways to cut this question. There’s sort of the what categories of entities get traded. And then there’s also value like what kind of value we typically see. I’ll add to the value one first, because I think that is something that may not be super well understood as we’re I think we’re the only platform that’s on Bitcoin, you know, EVM and Solana. Right. And a lot of it actually goes back to like, you know, how valuable is the block space? And on Bitcoin, we see extremely high value. At MTS, we’ve we’ve seen everything from, you know, Bugatti, put out some entities, like some rare golden eggs, which cost, I think, upwards of $25,000. We’ve seen

 

Bryce Paul  13:18

and then those could trade on your platform as well. Yeah, those

 

13:20

are on my magic button. Yeah. And then all the way down to Yeah, like profile pictures, you know, like cartoon images, drawings, you name it, right. We’re now seeing a lot of generative art that’s that trades on the coin as well. And that’s been all that stuff sort of trends towards high value because yeah, fees are expensive block space is expensive on Bitcoin. And then, on the other spectrum, Polygon Solana sort of more towards the lower value. And, and it isn’t, by the way that that’s like a overgeneralization. But I think just for simplicity, I’m drawing that that maybe lower cost. Yeah. Analog. Yeah. But the, what we see there is, yeah, is for like higher. Like larger collections. You know, like on Solana right now it’s, it is the cheapest place, if you want to launch something with, you know, 100,000 300,000 items, you could do it very, very, very low cost. And that’s being used by a bunch of different creatives, it’s being used by creatives who want to, say Test, test the waters a little bit, they want to test the like, validate the demand, right? Validated entities are a good marketing channel for them. And we think that’s cool, because it’s a it’s like a low risk way of trying out a bunch of things in NF T’s and when we need that, frankly, right. So that’s the kind of stuff that we see. We also tend to see more gaining items like polygon Solana both tend to have more like gaming items, whether it’s like games or what items you would use within the game, or the characters you would use within the game. Or it’s something kind of experimentation around giving away free items to acquire more users to try the game. So that kind of stuff is more so happening on the polygons and the salon is of the world. Then from a that’s like the value side, the category side? Yeah, I would say Bitcoin tends to have more of the art space, that generative art, they have kind of like brands and things, trying out various ways to engage their fan base, I’d say eath also has that ethos, it has a lot of PFS. And then on the slaughter polygon side, I think gaming is the the sort of newer use case that’s come on. It’s obviously still very early in that market. And yeah, we’re pretty excited to see a few more things develop over the next few years. One is like bringing real in real life like real life items, like on chain, so that they get the instant liquidity that comes with entities. We’re interested in music. We’re interested in tickets, we’re interested in, you know, all kinds of different collecting mechanisms. So hopefully that stuff comes in the next little while. But today, that’s sort of how I’d categorize it across categories and value.

 

Aaron Malone  16:17

That sounds like an amazing evolution. And while you were talking, I was reminded of something I read the other day, just about how many people are just pursuing their dream jobs. And there’s not enough people that are just doing the quote unquote, grunt work or the physical labor. But there’s going to be so many jobs in the very near future that are completely disintermediated, by AI, robotics, all kinds of things. And we should be free as human beings to pursue our passions and our dreams. And I think as we move into a world where web three is the norm, rather than the the edge and the fringe where it’s at right now, you’re going to look at an entirely different world that is based on a creators economy, where you’ve got so much competition with other people rather than gigantic corporations, and you’re free to really show your own artistic merits. And I think, you know what we’re talking about Antonio’s perspective of how to 10x Magic Eden. I see magic Eden is potentially a hub for creator tools to not just sell the art and stuff they’ve created, but to do the creation itself. And I’m thinking of you know, how Amazon has created space to easily publish a book. And now there’s so many things that are coming out where you can generate an entire video game, using artificial Fishel intelligence to do all the heavy lifting, and you just have to type the script. And the same thing could be done for film someday, or whatever it is. Do you see magic Eden going down the route of becoming a Creator tool hub as well?

 

17:52

Yeah, absolutely. Like, I would take a step back, as we think about, there’s a whole ecosystem around navigating of which creators are one of the absolute key pieces of this ecosystem. And you hit the nail on the head by saying, yeah, it is super, super important to enable creation of anything. Because the more experimentation that can happen on a platform like magic eating, I think the better it is not just for us, but just for the NFT space in general. And I’ll give you guys some examples of how we think about this. By the way, like, it’s funny that you called it create a hub or something. That’s actually how he described things internally to we have, that’s actually a product. Yeah, it’s called Creator, it actually is called Create a hub, where creators can come in, they have, yeah, there are basically space, they can do a whole bunch of different things, they can create a presale for the NFT collection, they can apply for like listing on our secondary market, they can apply for like a launch owl Launchpad product, which is a product that we partner with creators to then bring the best types of content, the best types of creators onto the platform. But over time, it’s going to be much more than this, even today. If you look at some of the things that happen on on other chains, like on Bitcoin, for example, just through the sheer nature of how it works, you need to inscribe, you know, images, text data, whatever it is that you’re trying to create the entity out of, you need to inscribe that on to individual Satoshis. And then we have a tool that enables creators to do that. Right? So they don’t have to do it in a very convoluted way. And that extends even more to inscribe, and then they can mince it on the platform, so on and so forth. So it should be a one stop shop. And you can totally imagine, you know what’s really cool about all this being on chain is that there’s a reason why large scale Korea, even if they are really big, why wouldn’t they want to come and actually experiment with this stuff? Because they should be able to see. And I think this is something we can also help with. On chain, you have a good sense of what people are actually doing, how much people spending, why are they doing that? What kinds of entities are they into? That is really, really interesting information that all kinds of creators can eventually tap into. So surfacing that enabling that not just the tooling side, but the data, the analytics, I think that’ll be an amazing set of infrastructure for creators to tap into. And hopefully, we have this vision that that can all happen on magic, even

 

Bryce Paul  20:44

when you think about like NF T’s maybe in their current form, in for how they’re being traded. What’s kind of like the total addressable market for the kind of NF T’s that we have right now. And you know, what, like, what gets big companies excited about getting involved? Like you said, like, I think, like, Bugatti, for instance, they did this, do they think that this is like a market they’re getting involved in? That’s going to 10x 100x they’re gonna make money? Are they just trying to engage in the culture and, you know, maybe get more, you know, engagement and sales and revenue that way? Why are companies involved in like, what’s the total addressable market?

 

21:20

Yeah. I mean, total addressable market? I mean, like, yeah, I can finger in the air something, obviously think it’s gonna be huge. You take the market for anything that can be collected. That already I think is far surpasses anything that’s even in crypto today. Why why is it that people want to get involved in this? There’s many reasons to do so I think, in the last like bull market? Yes, I think it was a lot motivated, definitely by how much money that can be made by MIT. Right. I think that absolutely was a big motivating factor. We we should not not acknowledge that. I think long term, why is it interesting for companies or whoever creators brands to get involved? It’s because there is, I almost see entities as a release today as another way that you as a company, or a creator, can engage with an audience. And ultimately, there’s many ways you can do that you can spend, what are the ads on Facebook, you can you know, you can run like billboards, you can start tick tock, right, like, whatever. There’s many, many ways you could do that. To engage your audience, but also expand beyond that. Nothing entities is very much in that realm of options. But what makes it unique is that I think this is absolutely true, NF TS drive. So much more loyalty, engagement, attention than any one of those traditional channels. And I really believe that if you look at the communities today, they’re all super tribal. They’re all extremely, right. They’re all really, really plugged in. There are somethings special there, there is definitely a special sauce. That

 

Bryce Paul  23:23

is it. Because it’s also like this, like you said, like the very act of being engaged with a company comes with a collectible, and that collectible has speculative value, and is that, you know, maybe unique to the NFT industry that that makes it a little bit more tribalistic or, you know, sticky or high value engagement.

 

23:45

Yeah, I think for some reason, these communities, there is some sense of just being part of something. Right. And that’s, that is what I believe a lot of people do crave that. And I do sense that that is actually a it’s much more tangible, much more prevalent. When you see that you see that in NF T communities. By the way, I also see this pretty strongly in like gaming communities. That’s why we think those two communities are very, there’s a lot of overlap, potentially, obviously, not today, but what technically happen. Gaming. You have the same, yes, very similar kinds of behaviors, both from a collectability sense, but also tribal, you know, passion within the community. So, yeah, that’s that’s sort of how we see I think, we’ll see how this plays out. But I do think that that is something that is very, very unique to NF T’s and something that creators and brands, you know, typically have had, you know, it’s like, there are many ways they can grow and engage the audience, but I really do think it’s a very unique way to do it through empties.

 

Aaron Malone  24:57

We saw some really big brands try and enter the NF T space with collections this year. And it fizzled out horribly. What do you think went wrong in some of those cases from your observation? And what does it take to make a successful community? In case there’s anyone out there listening that wants to do an NF T drop? What are some of the keys to success?

 

25:20

Well, yeah, one of the I think things that, yeah. So we, we had this Launchpad product that we’ve worked with probably, I don’t know, 600 700 creators at this point. So we see the whole the whole spectrum, I guess, you could say. But one of the Think big things about why some of these flop is you can kind of sniff from a mile away if someone is doing it for the wrong reasons. And I think people are not. Yeah. You know, that people recognize and see that pretty quickly. So I think the first thing about being successful is, you don’t put too much pressure on the situation. Like, one of the things that we always encourage is to actively grow the community, but do it in like a very sustainable way. So that’s definitely one, I think, too, especially if you’re, if you come in from the outside, you already have a big audience, and you think that that’s going to immediately be successful, I would say, spend some time to actually understand and get to know what’s happening in the community that’s existing, because actually tapping into that is actually I think, one of the best ways to kind of get started, right. So we’ve seen the really successful ones, try and leverage some of the existing network ecosystem that already exists, I think that’s a really smart way of going about it. And another big trend that we’re seeing is that rather than doing, you know, massive, expensive collection, start with something smaller, start with something lower pressure, and then build up once you start to identify what’s working and what’s not. That takes some acknowledgement that, yeah, you may not be good at everything may not nail everything at once. It takes some self awareness as well, and willingness to change, or, or go a different path. But that, yeah, you’ll see the best NFT creators that we have seen, have been able to lean into that dynamism, flexibility. And you see that with a lot of the top collections today that have stuck around, not all them, a lot of these creators may or may not make it, but they’re very, very good ones, I think that’s the reason that they are able to do so.

 

Aaron Malone  27:51

That’s really good insight. And one thing I want to just to add to that is, I think a lot of the really successful things are offering users an invitation to an experience, as opposed to a sales pitch to a product. And I think if people approach that more from the creation and marketing standpoint, they’re gonna have a lot more success in web three.

 

28:13

Well said, yeah,

 

Bryce Paul  28:15

no, I love it. So there’s, you know, a couple different ways that you could it sounds like, from what I understand, use magic eatin, you could be a content creator, and kind of make your own projects. But you could also leverage it kind of as like, almost a trader. And I don’t know if you’d call it trading, because it might not be as similar to like, you know, using your ETrade account. Maybe it’s almost like eBay, in how people would make money buying and selling stuff off of eBay. But what’s the trading experience? Like? And you know, are people making money trading on the platform? And how does that kind of work?

 

28:51

Yeah, let’s say yeah, Magic Kingdom is made up of two areas at the highest level one is the primary sale or primary market, which is that launch pad thing I was mentioning, or like, yeah, created some plugin and then effectively sell sell the, their content their creations on a primary market. And then yeah, as you said, there’s a secondary market. It’s like a where owners of items can list their item for sale, and then others can buy directly from them peer to peer. And yeah, I would say the, quote unquote, trading experience, you’ll see it varies a lot by by different NFT marketplaces. And there are some that take a very, very financialized view of all of this. That blur, and then yeah, exactly. And then as a result, then you build a certain type experience, you build like a professional trading experience around that. I think that’s useful for like a certain segment of users. You know, there’s obviously a very professional set of you users who want that kind of experience? Yeah, the end of the day, you got to build whoever you think is your Northstar customer. And for us, we think that Northstar still is those that are collectors, you know, they don’t really see this, as, you know, super trading trading oriented, they see this as, oh, that that’s really cool that that create a point out, I want that thing, right. And, yeah, in May, they may or may not sell that, immediately, they may hold it for a while. Who knows, but they’re kind of in it because they like it, they’d like to think. And that’s the North Star customer for us. And I think there it’s true in this market, there’s not as many of those at the moment, because we’re obviously seeing like a bear market, across the board. Like, especially in crypto. And but I think that is if we are to be successful, if this whole space is to be successful. We have we collectively here not just navigating, we collectively have to find a way to reach that audience and reach them onboard them. That’s why I think there’s, if you if you take that long term view, that’s ultimately I think, who we like to build the product for. And you’ll see that magically. And that’s how we’ve oriented things. There’s like really nice discovery, when you land on educated, there’s no different categories to look at. There’s a whole bunch of interesting information that one might look at, right, so they can get some better, like idea of what these collections are about. And they don’t have to trawl through all kinds of discards and Twitter’s and all these things to kind of get that sets. And so we oriented the product around that. And we still feel that is the most important type of user to focus on. So yeah, you’ll see this play out across the spectrum, we are more on the spectrum of like, Yeah, let’s have the those collectors and make sure they get on boarded really easily.

 

Bryce Paul  32:13

Incredible. Well, man Zed, this is, it’s great getting to see behind the behind the scenes of really what’s going on. I’d love to just ask what’s next. You know what, you guys have a feature that might be rolling out next month, or something we could all keep our eyes out for?

 

32:30

Yeah, this, there is one thing that I caught, I can’t fully talk about

 

Bryce Paul  32:34

top secret. But

 

32:36

that’s top secret. But I don’t know when this is going to. But basically, in about three weeks, there’s something really, really big that we’re going to be announcing, which is not a one time thing. It’s it’s it’s the beginning of a long, really exciting roadmap that I think our users are going to love. I think one thing that I yeah, I can definitely talk about is that we are expanding the set of, let’s call it, you know, asset types, so to speak, that that we support. You know, on Salida, we are working on a whole bunch of things around what’s called compressed NF T’s, which allows you creators to create just orders of magnitude more entities in a collection and do that much more easily and much more cost effectively. So we think the experimentation landscape should get really interesting. On the Bitcoin side, we’re working on a bunch of things that allow for just creation much more easily. So we’re starting to see domain names get really interesting there. People are trying to get their dot BTC handles, you know, similar to kind of what we saw with ens on Aetherium. Super cool. We’re starting to see these like be ERC 20s, which is effectively like kind of like fungible tokens, but on on Bitcoin that’s becoming very, very interesting. So we’re launching a bunch of things around the creation side of that, which we were pretty excited about. And then one other really big thing is that we are coming out with the hope was hopefully what we think is the best collection page experience. So today, users spend so much time browsing on individual collection pages. And there’s a there’s so much information density. Yeah, we’re coming out with basically what we think is an amazing redesign of that in the next couple of weeks. So yeah, stay tuned. There’s much more to come.

 

Aaron Malone  34:39

That’s awesome. Really excited to check it out.

 

Bryce Paul  34:41

Yeah, can’t wait. Well, yeah, before we let you go a couple just closing questions. We want to know outside of magic eaten or maybe outside of any affiliate. What is one company that all of our listeners should check out or maybe one application everybody should go download that you think is making Some big moves,

 

35:00

I would say, Okay, can I name kind of into? Oh, yeah, please. I would say there’s a company called drift. Okay, that they’re kind of building a whole bunch of Yeah, financial products. But yeah, super, they’ve made a ton of progress and really doing really cool things on their own Solana at the moment. Another one that I just started using this one. And I think it’s really just fun, beautiful experience. It’s called floor F, l, or R. And it’s like a NFT. Kind of like, portfolio tracker. Oh, and it’s like beautiful, really well designed. You can like track a bunch of your own wallets. Just just cool. And it’s something I’ve started using recently.

 

Bryce Paul  35:54

Right and it down. That sounds awesome. No, I appreciate the shout out that’s why we asked we always are looking for you know, what are the brightest minds and the builders in the space? You know, what are they actually using? What companies and kind of stuff so, where can people kind of find out more? Where can people stay in touch? You guys are really big discord community Telegram, Twitter. What’s your guys’s spot?

 

36:15

Yeah, you can find us on Twitter at Magic eating. We also have a big discord. And where else can find us? We obviously are on threads

 

Bryce Paul  36:28

you’re the first guest who has now said threads

 

36:34

I didn’t have any about actual communities that were tried it out. I think Twitter is still the main place. Yeah. And yeah, as you keep going, I

 

Bryce Paul  36:45

will be around. Love it. Alright Dad, take care and everybody at home listening. Thanks for tuning in.

 

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In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Zhuoxun Yin of Magic Eden which is a decentralized marketplace for peer-to-peer trading of non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Magic Eden is a leading trading platform for users to mint, list, and trade NFTs. Initially developed for the Solana blockchain, it has since expanded its offering to include support for Ethereum and Polygon.

 

— TRANSCRIPT —

 

SPEAKERS

Bryce Paul, Aaron Malone

 

Bryce Paul  00:09

All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto 101 podcast. You guys know what time it is we’re bringing on more legendary builders in the crypto space. Pizza mind. I’m particularly excited for this one and I think anybody at home who’s listening will be too if, particularly if they’re interested in learning about NF T’s. What would you say? Pete’s?

 

Aaron Malone  00:34

I would say there’s going to be a magical episode.

 

Bryce Paul  00:38

Why do you say it’d be so magical?

 

Aaron Malone  00:41

Because we have co founder Joshin from Magic eaten the show today?

 

Bryce Paul  00:46

Damn. Yes, let’s do it. Zed, aka Zed. From magic Eden. How’s it going, man?

 

00:53

Yeah, let’s go. What’s up, guys? Thanks so much for the tee up. No one’s ever done a magical episode before so that’s that’s duck.

 

Bryce Paul  01:01

Yes, we did pizza mines legendary fish ponds. But no, we’re excited man, you guys have been building incredible. Really cross chain NFT tooling and an awesome platform for a year, two years. We want to know the whole founding story. We want you to just kind of tell all. But before we do that, let’s let’s just get acquainted with you. And you know Who who are you and what were you doing really before? Founding magic Eden?

 

01:28

Yeah, for sure. Excited to be on here. So Thanks for Thanks. Thanks for having me. I first got into crypto in about 2017. My background before that was a little bit all over the place. I tell people that I did actually spend about a year of my life in my pre crypto days doing doing mining and people think they automatically assume that that’s kind of some kind of Bitcoin mining or or theory of mining or something. But I was actually working in underground mines. Literally was in like, yeah, a uranium mine for like a year. Wow.

 

Aaron Malone  02:05

Yeah, that’s how your superpowers Okay. Make sense?

 

02:09

Yeah, that’s, you could call it that. But this is back in another lifetime. I was I was I’m from Australia, hence, you know, it kind of makes sense. But I was working in mining at the time I was in a in a consulting firm. They put me there. And then I moved to the US in about 2015. Yeah, generally just been a very inquisitive dude. Like, I just enjoy getting into new technologies. And around that time, when I moved to San Francisco, there’s, there’s no, there’s no shortage of interesting things going on. But one of those things, was lucky enough to kind of come across crypto had a few friends who were working at Coinbase, that sort of 2015 2016 era, and was lucky enough to kind of learn a bit about Bitcoin. And then in 2017, all this stuff started happening on Aetherium. And in many ways, it’s kind of funny, like the 2017, Ico boom, were very analogous to what happened with NF T’s and 21. And that’s when I first got interested, I ended up joining a team dydx as the second employee in 20, late 2017, early 18. So shout out to those guys. Yeah. And the cap.

 

Bryce Paul  03:15

Antonio was on the show recently. Oh, sick.

 

03:19

Yeah, solid, solid guy. And anyway, I spent a few years the lead an absolute ton about what it takes to build in crypto. I mean, we went through, obviously, the cycles, went through various rounds of product iteration. You know, he’s famously known for kind of like throwing away that previous thing and making 10x bets. And I really, really, really admire that. I spent a little bit of time at Coinbase after building institutional products, which is really interesting as well during that was during the time when hedge funds and corporates macro was was really full into Bitcoin. And I left in Yeah, sort of, like mid 21. And we started Majeed and then September 21, and the whole kind of founding story is that we were all you know, DJing on the side, doing our own little thing, right? We were trading at a tease would, you know, obviously part of deep Isola before that. And we started using a bunch of different things on all the chains like I remember I had avalanche wallets, I polygon wallets. I had Solana wallets, we were just kind of using all kinds of things. And there was something magical when we first used was first first like set, it’s a lot of transaction, because was so fast, it was so cheap. And we thought that immediately, if NF T’s are sort of a consumer use case, there must be something that happens on a chain that is much, much more performant. And that was the original thesis and obviously, that played out really well for us, in terms of just like, getting us the amazing initial traction that we had when we first started the company and we felt really confident about it. As a team, because I’ve met myself and I’ve three co founders. Alongside me, the background of team is very much like crypto, there’s a lot of crypto native experience, like Sid started a Bitcoin company in 2012 2013. Jack and I were both both working in crypto before starting magic eating. And then a few of the guys, two of the guys actually were very, very early engineers at UberEATS. So we spent a lot of time building consumer marketplaces. And that was the beginning. We, we fired it up and it went from there.

 

Bryce Paul  05:33

Wow, I love it. And I mean, I think our viewers at home have a lot of questions, but maybe the first one that was on our mind was What were you doing by uranium mines? What was what was going on there? I have to know I’m so curious.

 

05:47

You’re not gonna believe this? Because it’s like so we didn’t ridiculous. But I was like fresh out of college. I joined this consulting firm, and you think like, it’s going to be sexy. You’re gonna go like,

 

Bryce Paul  05:59

yes, certain times. You’re in New York Wall Street offices.

 

06:03

Exactly. Corporate Strategy, whatever it is. Next thing I know they shipped me out to the mines and my job was to help help reduce like the cost of digging up the dirt. I like literally was riding along in the trucks measuring how long it would take to do things. Crazy experience.

 

Aaron Malone  06:26

When you went to college for Yeah,

 

06:28

did study economics and to end up in a uranium mine.

 

Aaron Malone  06:34

Well, you ended up on Solana, which is a pretty rare thing itself. What was it? Well, let’s address the elephant in the room was salam has taken a beating. Yeah, in so many different ways over the past couple of years. Do you still believe in Solana or it is magic even get a branch out to other things? For the sake of survival, not just reach? What gives us the rest for Solana confidence from a developer’s perspective State

 

07:01

of the Union State of the Union? Here we go. I always actually I would very much. Yeah, the universal I think common narrative. Very easy narrative right now is to diss on Solana. And by no means am I like dogmatic about certain things. You know, like when I was a dydx, Saint, actually, it’s the same thing eat went down to 70 bucks in 2018 19. Aaron Malone said IEF was dead at the time too. And there was a certain tribalism that remained there, that really was the foundation of greater things to come. I think the same thing will likely be true for slaughter. It is absolutely still true in parallel, that it’s taken a beating, right in the last six months or so. But that tribal developer community is absolutely still there. And we, we know it, we hear it, they’re very vocal, we experience it every day. But I would say all of the cross chain stuff we’re doing is not, you know, a survival mechanism, so to speak, right? Because, you know, we, as a company, we’re very lucky, we’re well capitalized. A lot of the things that I think you should do in crypto, and I’ve sort of referenced this before with kind of Antonio’s mindset at dydx, you should make big debts. That’s what we’re here for. Right? Make big bets, innovate on on the on top of the people who came before you. And if that means, you know, for us, a lot of what guides us is where do we think the market and for entities but also, all of these use cases that drive NF T’s? Or is that going to be three years, five years, 10 years from now let’s build for that. Because I think, taking too much of a lens into the what the cycle is right now what the mindset is right now. It can be very, very distracting. So yeah, till the State of the Union address is is true, I think slot has taken a beating. But a lot of the reason that people went there in the first place, all that stuff is still true. And if you look at what is the most robust ecosystem outside of EDM, it is definitely Solana. So if someone is going to make a bet on on something outside of EDM, I think that still is the best that for us is a cross chain marketplace, which has been a stated vision of ours for a long time. It will be obviously a focus of ours. There will be many other focuses too, and we can get into it. But yeah, ordinals EDM has so much interesting stuff going on. So we also have longtime conviction on on the soul space, dude. Yeah, like

 

Bryce Paul  09:34

if we actually zoom out to like, what’s behind that conviction in the long term kind of, of this space? Like, what is NF T’s like, you know, explaining to folks like my dad, right, who are like, yeah, like, I don’t I don’t get NF T’s kind of the average guy who’s not in the market. How do you guys kind of explain the value prop of NF T’s broadly?

 

09:55

Yeah, there’s many. There’s so many ways to explain this, but I think at its core or the thing that really resonates with a lot of people is that, ultimately, it’s collectability. But in a much, much more supercharged kind of way. I would like to talk about internally, we kind of referenced this, at least magic eden, in the sense of supporting, yes, supercharging, kind of what digital commerce can look like, right. And I think entities are at the heart of that. Because if you look at many, many kinds of collecting, that happens, even traditionally, whether it’s, you know, baseball cards, or whether it’s like, luxury watches, there’s this fundamental need to either collect something, because that’s just what people like to do. Or it’s, it’s collecting for the, for the focus of being able to say that I own this luxury thing, I own this rare thing. It’s like a flex mechanism, right. And at its core, that’s what entities enable, but they also enable so much more than that, because it is, you know, on chain, and the on chain part for sure is the part that really gets people tied up when you try to explain it to a non crypto native person. But, like to us, a lot of that is, is super, super helpful, because it bakes in all these concepts of like, true ownership. And in so many traditional, I guess methods of transacting or, or, or even owning things, you don’t really get that you don’t get, like the true sense of like property rights. Imagine all of that. But it’s just fully fully digitized, and fully, fully proven. We think that is a really, really amazing innovation. And we haven’t scratched the surface in terms of what things that can be applied to yet. It seems a bit silly that it’s applied to like PFPs today, but these things take time. So we’ll be hopefully at the center of the evolution here.

 

Bryce Paul  12:04

Yeah, so tell us what what magic eaten typically sees trade on its platform, like what are the quality of NF T’s? Like what kind of stuff trades? And like you said, like, you know, as the space evolves, maybe how do you foresee magic eaten changing over over the course of time? Like what kind of assets at trade?

 

12:25

Yeah, so there’s a number of ways to cut this question. There’s sort of the what categories of entities get traded. And then there’s also value like what kind of value we typically see. I’ll add to the value one first, because I think that is something that may not be super well understood as we’re I think we’re the only platform that’s on Bitcoin, you know, EVM and Solana. Right. And a lot of it actually goes back to like, you know, how valuable is the block space? And on Bitcoin, we see extremely high value. At MTS, we’ve we’ve seen everything from, you know, Bugatti, put out some entities, like some rare golden eggs, which cost, I think, upwards of $25,000. We’ve seen

 

Bryce Paul  13:18

and then those could trade on your platform as well. Yeah, those

 

13:20

are on my magic button. Yeah. And then all the way down to Yeah, like profile pictures, you know, like cartoon images, drawings, you name it, right. We’re now seeing a lot of generative art that’s that trades on the coin as well. And that’s been all that stuff sort of trends towards high value because yeah, fees are expensive block space is expensive on Bitcoin. And then, on the other spectrum, Polygon Solana sort of more towards the lower value. And, and it isn’t, by the way that that’s like a overgeneralization. But I think just for simplicity, I’m drawing that that maybe lower cost. Yeah. Analog. Yeah. But the, what we see there is, yeah, is for like higher. Like larger collections. You know, like on Solana right now it’s, it is the cheapest place, if you want to launch something with, you know, 100,000 300,000 items, you could do it very, very, very low cost. And that’s being used by a bunch of different creatives, it’s being used by creatives who want to, say Test, test the waters a little bit, they want to test the like, validate the demand, right? Validated entities are a good marketing channel for them. And we think that’s cool, because it’s a it’s like a low risk way of trying out a bunch of things in NF T’s and when we need that, frankly, right. So that’s the kind of stuff that we see. We also tend to see more gaining items like polygon Solana both tend to have more like gaming items, whether it’s like games or what items you would use within the game, or the characters you would use within the game. Or it’s something kind of experimentation around giving away free items to acquire more users to try the game. So that kind of stuff is more so happening on the polygons and the salon is of the world. Then from a that’s like the value side, the category side? Yeah, I would say Bitcoin tends to have more of the art space, that generative art, they have kind of like brands and things, trying out various ways to engage their fan base, I’d say eath also has that ethos, it has a lot of PFS. And then on the slaughter polygon side, I think gaming is the the sort of newer use case that’s come on. It’s obviously still very early in that market. And yeah, we’re pretty excited to see a few more things develop over the next few years. One is like bringing real in real life like real life items, like on chain, so that they get the instant liquidity that comes with entities. We’re interested in music. We’re interested in tickets, we’re interested in, you know, all kinds of different collecting mechanisms. So hopefully that stuff comes in the next little while. But today, that’s sort of how I’d categorize it across categories and value.

 

Aaron Malone  16:17

That sounds like an amazing evolution. And while you were talking, I was reminded of something I read the other day, just about how many people are just pursuing their dream jobs. And there’s not enough people that are just doing the quote unquote, grunt work or the physical labor. But there’s going to be so many jobs in the very near future that are completely disintermediated, by AI, robotics, all kinds of things. And we should be free as human beings to pursue our passions and our dreams. And I think as we move into a world where web three is the norm, rather than the the edge and the fringe where it’s at right now, you’re going to look at an entirely different world that is based on a creators economy, where you’ve got so much competition with other people rather than gigantic corporations, and you’re free to really show your own artistic merits. And I think, you know what we’re talking about Antonio’s perspective of how to 10x Magic Eden. I see magic Eden is potentially a hub for creator tools to not just sell the art and stuff they’ve created, but to do the creation itself. And I’m thinking of you know, how Amazon has created space to easily publish a book. And now there’s so many things that are coming out where you can generate an entire video game, using artificial Fishel intelligence to do all the heavy lifting, and you just have to type the script. And the same thing could be done for film someday, or whatever it is. Do you see magic Eden going down the route of becoming a Creator tool hub as well?

 

17:52

Yeah, absolutely. Like, I would take a step back, as we think about, there’s a whole ecosystem around navigating of which creators are one of the absolute key pieces of this ecosystem. And you hit the nail on the head by saying, yeah, it is super, super important to enable creation of anything. Because the more experimentation that can happen on a platform like magic eating, I think the better it is not just for us, but just for the NFT space in general. And I’ll give you guys some examples of how we think about this. By the way, like, it’s funny that you called it create a hub or something. That’s actually how he described things internally to we have, that’s actually a product. Yeah, it’s called Creator, it actually is called Create a hub, where creators can come in, they have, yeah, there are basically space, they can do a whole bunch of different things, they can create a presale for the NFT collection, they can apply for like listing on our secondary market, they can apply for like a launch owl Launchpad product, which is a product that we partner with creators to then bring the best types of content, the best types of creators onto the platform. But over time, it’s going to be much more than this, even today. If you look at some of the things that happen on on other chains, like on Bitcoin, for example, just through the sheer nature of how it works, you need to inscribe, you know, images, text data, whatever it is that you’re trying to create the entity out of, you need to inscribe that on to individual Satoshis. And then we have a tool that enables creators to do that. Right? So they don’t have to do it in a very convoluted way. And that extends even more to inscribe, and then they can mince it on the platform, so on and so forth. So it should be a one stop shop. And you can totally imagine, you know what’s really cool about all this being on chain is that there’s a reason why large scale Korea, even if they are really big, why wouldn’t they want to come and actually experiment with this stuff? Because they should be able to see. And I think this is something we can also help with. On chain, you have a good sense of what people are actually doing, how much people spending, why are they doing that? What kinds of entities are they into? That is really, really interesting information that all kinds of creators can eventually tap into. So surfacing that enabling that not just the tooling side, but the data, the analytics, I think that’ll be an amazing set of infrastructure for creators to tap into. And hopefully, we have this vision that that can all happen on magic, even

 

Bryce Paul  20:44

when you think about like NF T’s maybe in their current form, in for how they’re being traded. What’s kind of like the total addressable market for the kind of NF T’s that we have right now. And you know, what, like, what gets big companies excited about getting involved? Like you said, like, I think, like, Bugatti, for instance, they did this, do they think that this is like a market they’re getting involved in? That’s going to 10x 100x they’re gonna make money? Are they just trying to engage in the culture and, you know, maybe get more, you know, engagement and sales and revenue that way? Why are companies involved in like, what’s the total addressable market?

 

21:20

Yeah. I mean, total addressable market? I mean, like, yeah, I can finger in the air something, obviously think it’s gonna be huge. You take the market for anything that can be collected. That already I think is far surpasses anything that’s even in crypto today. Why why is it that people want to get involved in this? There’s many reasons to do so I think, in the last like bull market? Yes, I think it was a lot motivated, definitely by how much money that can be made by MIT. Right. I think that absolutely was a big motivating factor. We we should not not acknowledge that. I think long term, why is it interesting for companies or whoever creators brands to get involved? It’s because there is, I almost see entities as a release today as another way that you as a company, or a creator, can engage with an audience. And ultimately, there’s many ways you can do that you can spend, what are the ads on Facebook, you can you know, you can run like billboards, you can start tick tock, right, like, whatever. There’s many, many ways you could do that. To engage your audience, but also expand beyond that. Nothing entities is very much in that realm of options. But what makes it unique is that I think this is absolutely true, NF TS drive. So much more loyalty, engagement, attention than any one of those traditional channels. And I really believe that if you look at the communities today, they’re all super tribal. They’re all extremely, right. They’re all really, really plugged in. There are somethings special there, there is definitely a special sauce. That

 

Bryce Paul  23:23

is it. Because it’s also like this, like you said, like the very act of being engaged with a company comes with a collectible, and that collectible has speculative value, and is that, you know, maybe unique to the NFT industry that that makes it a little bit more tribalistic or, you know, sticky or high value engagement.

 

23:45

Yeah, I think for some reason, these communities, there is some sense of just being part of something. Right. And that’s, that is what I believe a lot of people do crave that. And I do sense that that is actually a it’s much more tangible, much more prevalent. When you see that you see that in NF T communities. By the way, I also see this pretty strongly in like gaming communities. That’s why we think those two communities are very, there’s a lot of overlap, potentially, obviously, not today, but what technically happen. Gaming. You have the same, yes, very similar kinds of behaviors, both from a collectability sense, but also tribal, you know, passion within the community. So, yeah, that’s that’s sort of how we see I think, we’ll see how this plays out. But I do think that that is something that is very, very unique to NF T’s and something that creators and brands, you know, typically have had, you know, it’s like, there are many ways they can grow and engage the audience, but I really do think it’s a very unique way to do it through empties.

 

Aaron Malone  24:57

We saw some really big brands try and enter the NF T space with collections this year. And it fizzled out horribly. What do you think went wrong in some of those cases from your observation? And what does it take to make a successful community? In case there’s anyone out there listening that wants to do an NF T drop? What are some of the keys to success?

 

25:20

Well, yeah, one of the I think things that, yeah. So we, we had this Launchpad product that we’ve worked with probably, I don’t know, 600 700 creators at this point. So we see the whole the whole spectrum, I guess, you could say. But one of the Think big things about why some of these flop is you can kind of sniff from a mile away if someone is doing it for the wrong reasons. And I think people are not. Yeah. You know, that people recognize and see that pretty quickly. So I think the first thing about being successful is, you don’t put too much pressure on the situation. Like, one of the things that we always encourage is to actively grow the community, but do it in like a very sustainable way. So that’s definitely one, I think, too, especially if you’re, if you come in from the outside, you already have a big audience, and you think that that’s going to immediately be successful, I would say, spend some time to actually understand and get to know what’s happening in the community that’s existing, because actually tapping into that is actually I think, one of the best ways to kind of get started, right. So we’ve seen the really successful ones, try and leverage some of the existing network ecosystem that already exists, I think that’s a really smart way of going about it. And another big trend that we’re seeing is that rather than doing, you know, massive, expensive collection, start with something smaller, start with something lower pressure, and then build up once you start to identify what’s working and what’s not. That takes some acknowledgement that, yeah, you may not be good at everything may not nail everything at once. It takes some self awareness as well, and willingness to change, or, or go a different path. But that, yeah, you’ll see the best NFT creators that we have seen, have been able to lean into that dynamism, flexibility. And you see that with a lot of the top collections today that have stuck around, not all them, a lot of these creators may or may not make it, but they’re very, very good ones, I think that’s the reason that they are able to do so.

 

Aaron Malone  27:51

That’s really good insight. And one thing I want to just to add to that is, I think a lot of the really successful things are offering users an invitation to an experience, as opposed to a sales pitch to a product. And I think if people approach that more from the creation and marketing standpoint, they’re gonna have a lot more success in web three.

 

28:13

Well said, yeah,

 

Bryce Paul  28:15

no, I love it. So there’s, you know, a couple different ways that you could it sounds like, from what I understand, use magic eatin, you could be a content creator, and kind of make your own projects. But you could also leverage it kind of as like, almost a trader. And I don’t know if you’d call it trading, because it might not be as similar to like, you know, using your ETrade account. Maybe it’s almost like eBay, in how people would make money buying and selling stuff off of eBay. But what’s the trading experience? Like? And you know, are people making money trading on the platform? And how does that kind of work?

 

28:51

Yeah, let’s say yeah, Magic Kingdom is made up of two areas at the highest level one is the primary sale or primary market, which is that launch pad thing I was mentioning, or like, yeah, created some plugin and then effectively sell sell the, their content their creations on a primary market. And then yeah, as you said, there’s a secondary market. It’s like a where owners of items can list their item for sale, and then others can buy directly from them peer to peer. And yeah, I would say the, quote unquote, trading experience, you’ll see it varies a lot by by different NFT marketplaces. And there are some that take a very, very financialized view of all of this. That blur, and then yeah, exactly. And then as a result, then you build a certain type experience, you build like a professional trading experience around that. I think that’s useful for like a certain segment of users. You know, there’s obviously a very professional set of you users who want that kind of experience? Yeah, the end of the day, you got to build whoever you think is your Northstar customer. And for us, we think that Northstar still is those that are collectors, you know, they don’t really see this, as, you know, super trading trading oriented, they see this as, oh, that that’s really cool that that create a point out, I want that thing, right. And, yeah, in May, they may or may not sell that, immediately, they may hold it for a while. Who knows, but they’re kind of in it because they like it, they’d like to think. And that’s the North Star customer for us. And I think there it’s true in this market, there’s not as many of those at the moment, because we’re obviously seeing like a bear market, across the board. Like, especially in crypto. And but I think that is if we are to be successful, if this whole space is to be successful. We have we collectively here not just navigating, we collectively have to find a way to reach that audience and reach them onboard them. That’s why I think there’s, if you if you take that long term view, that’s ultimately I think, who we like to build the product for. And you’ll see that magically. And that’s how we’ve oriented things. There’s like really nice discovery, when you land on educated, there’s no different categories to look at. There’s a whole bunch of interesting information that one might look at, right, so they can get some better, like idea of what these collections are about. And they don’t have to trawl through all kinds of discards and Twitter’s and all these things to kind of get that sets. And so we oriented the product around that. And we still feel that is the most important type of user to focus on. So yeah, you’ll see this play out across the spectrum, we are more on the spectrum of like, Yeah, let’s have the those collectors and make sure they get on boarded really easily.

 

Bryce Paul  32:13

Incredible. Well, man Zed, this is, it’s great getting to see behind the behind the scenes of really what’s going on. I’d love to just ask what’s next. You know what, you guys have a feature that might be rolling out next month, or something we could all keep our eyes out for?

 

32:30

Yeah, this, there is one thing that I caught, I can’t fully talk about

 

Bryce Paul  32:34

top secret. But

 

32:36

that’s top secret. But I don’t know when this is going to. But basically, in about three weeks, there’s something really, really big that we’re going to be announcing, which is not a one time thing. It’s it’s it’s the beginning of a long, really exciting roadmap that I think our users are going to love. I think one thing that I yeah, I can definitely talk about is that we are expanding the set of, let’s call it, you know, asset types, so to speak, that that we support. You know, on Salida, we are working on a whole bunch of things around what’s called compressed NF T’s, which allows you creators to create just orders of magnitude more entities in a collection and do that much more easily and much more cost effectively. So we think the experimentation landscape should get really interesting. On the Bitcoin side, we’re working on a bunch of things that allow for just creation much more easily. So we’re starting to see domain names get really interesting there. People are trying to get their dot BTC handles, you know, similar to kind of what we saw with ens on Aetherium. Super cool. We’re starting to see these like be ERC 20s, which is effectively like kind of like fungible tokens, but on on Bitcoin that’s becoming very, very interesting. So we’re launching a bunch of things around the creation side of that, which we were pretty excited about. And then one other really big thing is that we are coming out with the hope was hopefully what we think is the best collection page experience. So today, users spend so much time browsing on individual collection pages. And there’s a there’s so much information density. Yeah, we’re coming out with basically what we think is an amazing redesign of that in the next couple of weeks. So yeah, stay tuned. There’s much more to come.

 

Aaron Malone  34:39

That’s awesome. Really excited to check it out.

 

Bryce Paul  34:41

Yeah, can’t wait. Well, yeah, before we let you go a couple just closing questions. We want to know outside of magic eaten or maybe outside of any affiliate. What is one company that all of our listeners should check out or maybe one application everybody should go download that you think is making Some big moves,

 

35:00

I would say, Okay, can I name kind of into? Oh, yeah, please. I would say there’s a company called drift. Okay, that they’re kind of building a whole bunch of Yeah, financial products. But yeah, super, they’ve made a ton of progress and really doing really cool things on their own Solana at the moment. Another one that I just started using this one. And I think it’s really just fun, beautiful experience. It’s called floor F, l, or R. And it’s like a NFT. Kind of like, portfolio tracker. Oh, and it’s like beautiful, really well designed. You can like track a bunch of your own wallets. Just just cool. And it’s something I’ve started using recently.

 

Bryce Paul  35:54

Right and it down. That sounds awesome. No, I appreciate the shout out that’s why we asked we always are looking for you know, what are the brightest minds and the builders in the space? You know, what are they actually using? What companies and kind of stuff so, where can people kind of find out more? Where can people stay in touch? You guys are really big discord community Telegram, Twitter. What’s your guys’s spot?

 

36:15

Yeah, you can find us on Twitter at Magic eating. We also have a big discord. And where else can find us? We obviously are on threads

 

Bryce Paul  36:28

you’re the first guest who has now said threads

 

36:34

I didn’t have any about actual communities that were tried it out. I think Twitter is still the main place. Yeah. And yeah, as you keep going, I

 

Bryce Paul  36:45

will be around. Love it. Alright Dad, take care and everybody at home listening. Thanks for tuning in.

 

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