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Leading NFT marketplace Magic Eden is shaking up its token plans.
Months after revealing plans to launch a fungible token with the NFT ticker in alliance with a mysterious organization called the Non-Fungible DAO, Magic Eden announced Thursday that it will stick with its existing branding instead: an ME token from the rebranded ME Foundation.
Details on when the ME token will launch and how it will be distributed—including through a potential airdrop to Magic Eden traders who have earned Diamond rewards (aka points)—are still unclear. However, we know that the token will only be claimable through the Magic Eden Wallet on mobile and desktop.
ME Foundation Director Matt Szenics told Decrypt that the original idea behind the “NFT” token name was to effectively claim a ticker that could represent the asset class—that is, non-fungible tokens, or blockchain tokens that represent ownership of unique items like artwork, rare video game items, and more.
“The ambition was: Hey, it'd be really bullish if we just lock down this token ticker to basically have people think of us as the NFT token project,” he said. “And it's kind of just easy, right? And you represent the multi-trillion-dollar asset class of the future.”
But a couple things happened after that point, he recalled. First, Magic Eden quickly rose to the top spot in the NFT space in terms of trading volume, bolstered by increased demand for Bitcoin Ordinals early this year ahead of halving.
And second, the multi-chain Magic Eden started to expand beyond NFTs, which has been the platform’s focus since its initial launch on Solana in 2001. Magic Eden launched its own cross-chain wallet after an initial beta rollout late last year, and then debuted support for Runes—a Bitcoin version of fungible tokens, launched back in April.
As Magic Eden’s ambitions expanded, Szenics said that the Foundation and Magic Eden itself—where he was previously employed—decided to stick with the branding that had built up so much recognition in the crypto world over the last three years.
“We want this to represent something greater than just NFTs, especially if down the line, we adopt protocols that represent fungible token standards,” he said, adding that the ME Foundation team wanted to “give ourselves room” to expand beyond the NFT market and launch a community token for many purposes.
“That doesn’t mean we’re not bullish on [NFTs],” he added.
The “we” in those comments refers to the ME Foundation, not Magic Eden—though there’s clearly potential for confusion with the shared branding.
Despite the name swap for the token and the Foundation backing it, Szenics said that the core details otherwise remain the same. The ME Foundation is being built around the various NFT protocols that Magic Eden built and then granted to the Foundation, which made them open-source and freely available for use by other marketplaces and platforms.
The goal, then, is to encourage other companies to adopt those NFT protocols and smart contracts—and to adopt the ME token, as well. Szenics said that the ME Foundation will eventually issue developer token grants to help onboard platforms and their users, in the hopes of making the ME token usable broadly beyond just Magic Eden itself.
Despite the shared branding, Szenics also insisted that the Cayman Islands-based ME Foundation is a separate entity from Magic Eden, and that this isn’t simply a thinly-veiled form of “decentralization theater.”
Currently a team of two, including Magic Eden’s former General Manager Tiffany Huang, the ME Foundation’s employees were formally split off from Magic Eden—and even cut out of the startup's Slack server, he said.
The ME Foundation is a separate company with its own charter and an agreement to use Magic Eden’s marks, he added. They plan to expand the team as the Foundation oversees the ME launch and token distribution ahead, encourages growth and adoption across the crypto space, and stewards the eventual DAO of token holders.
Sticking with the Magic Eden branding is something of a tribute to Magic Eden, Szenics said, even though the future of the ME token could span protocols built by other teams.
“It's almost like an homage to the original builders of the protocols,” he said. “Who knows, in the future, what protocols the Foundation will have? But it's there to start—and the facts are that the original builder was Magic Eden.”
“Now they're open source,” he said of the protocols underpinning the ME Foundation and token. “They belong here.”