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NFT marketplace Magic Eden, which generates roughly 90% of secondary trading volume on Solana, will be adding and integrating Ethereum NFTs onto the platform, the company announced on Tuesday.
Magic Eden will enable cross-currency purchase support for Solana and Ethereum NFTs (non-fungible tokens) so that collectors can purchase NFTs in either solana or ether and trade more easily using new market analytics tools.
The marketplace first hinted at a multichain expansion when it raised $130 million in a Series B funding round, led by venture capital firms Electric Capital and Greylock, in June. Magic Eden is now integrating Ethereum, the largest blockchain for NFTs, at a time when the upcoming Merge has many questioning the Ethereum’s future.
The timing coincides with a bear market, and despite the fact that “volume was a little softer in July compared to June,” according to Zhuoxun Yin, chief operating officer and Magic Eden co-founder, “there are enough collectors and creators across Solana and Ethereum who are still innovating.”
The NFT marketplace recently launched Magic Ventures, a new venture capital fund focused on investing in Web3 games and funding its own games. The fund operates under Eden Games, the company’s internal gaming division. It also introduced its own semi-fungible token (SFT) marketplaces for Web3 games.
“We believe that the future of NFT and Web3 mass-adoption is cross-chain marketplace experiences,” Yin told Blockworks.
“Creators launching with Magic Eden will no longer have to face the difficult decision of choosing one chain over another at the cost of limiting their potential audience reach,” he stated in a press release.
The Magic Eden Launchpad is the marketplace’s exclusive minting platform and has helped bring over 300 NFT projects to market. Now Solana and Ethereum-compatible, Launchpad will maintain its minting set up, white-glove marketing support and customized launch build outs, according to the company.
The first native Ethereum project to soon launch on Magic Eden — for users to mint in both ether and solana — is called EZU, a sister collection of the popular ETH project Psychedelics Anonymous.
When asked about OpenSea’s integration of Solana NFTs back in April, Yin said OpenSea has not taken any liquidity from Magic Eden. “We remain community centric and are proud of our relationships with the collections and collectors on Solana, and view this as a core differentiator for our entry into ETH,” he said.
OpenSea tweeted about “Solana marketplaces taking custody of NFTs,” on July 27, and while it did not explicitly name Magic Eden, it may have been one of its targets. “We believe marketplaces that custody your NFTs limit choice and utility, and compromise security,” OpenSea said in its Twitter thread.
Magic Eden has a policy of keeping users’ NFT assets in escrow wallets, and while this is not a new policy, the two companies have publically tiffed on multiple occasions via Twitter.
Magic Eden argued its policy is about security and has previously fired back at OpenSea for getting sued after multiple hacks.
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