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The Build Market is Here
Top Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace of Solana—Magic Eden—added unlisted bidding, allowing users to bid on off-market NFTs.
The team announced the new feature on May 11 via Twitter, consolidating the NFT platform as the most popular on Solana. From now on, users can see all the items from a collection, regardless of whether they are on sale or not, and place an offer to buy them.
Magic Eden has been regularly adding new features and expanding the marketplace, so Web3Wire reached out to learn more about how they prioritize all these new ideas.
“Magic Eden is a very community-first sort of company. Prioritization framework is a process of cross-matching North Star of the product and community/user needs. In this particular case, only 10% of NFTs are listed at any given time,” said Co-Founder and CTO Sidney Zhang. "Adding to that, making offers to unlisted NFTs is something that users have been asking for a while. And once launched, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive."
The platform is looking for new ways to capture market share, and the new feature aims at 90% of all Solana NFTs.
The NFT ecosystem on Solana is rapidly growing, and if it continues at this pace, it could threaten more mature markets like Ethereum. According to DappRadar, the NFT trading volume on Solana rose 91% last month, reaching close to $300 million. Moreover, during the first two weeks of May, the total NFT transactions in both blockchains were very close – around 400K (as per Cryptoslam).
One could think that a general market downturn—like the one we are experiencing now—would also jeopardize the Solana NFT market. Referring to this, Zhang told Web3Wire:
“Actually, despite the fungible market’s recent volatility, the NFT market is extremely robust as of today. The first 13 days of May are already reaching the entire month of March SOL volume. Our traffic remains very high. But if an NFT market downturn comes eventually (which we haven’t seen the evidence yet), we are just going to hunker down and build.”
As the Solana ecosystem works on reducing partial outages to fight against NFT minting bots—there are already a couple of solutions—its speed and low cost are some of the reasons the tide seems to be turning. In addition, VC firms have been deploying millions over the last couple of months to accelerate this shift and bring higher quality projects into the space. With $27 million in fresh funding, Magic Eden’s ambition is to capitalize on this and become one of the bigger players.
Check out this Web3 Wire article to learn how to buy NFTs on Magic Eden.
What is Magic Eden:
Magic Eden is the leading NFT platform on the Solana blockchain. It facilitates the buying, selling, and minting of NFTs and holds over 90% market share for secondary trading volume on the Solana.