Magic Eden

Magic Eden was founded in September 2021 by Jack Lu, Zhuoxun Yin ('Zedd'), Sidney Zhang, and Zhuojie Zhou ('Rex') to build an NFT marketplace on Solana at a moment when Solana's low fees and high throughput were attracting NFT activity away from Ethereum. Lu, who began building bitcoin wallet apps in 2013 and later worked at FTX (where he says he 'saw the huge potential in Solana') and as a product manager at Google, became CEO. Yin, a crypto participant since 2017 who was employee #2 at dYdX and a senior PM at Coinbase, became COO. Zhang, who holds an MS in Computer Science from Georgia Tech and previously worked at Facebook and on Uber's Advanced Technologies (autonomous vehicles) group and co-founded blockchain-dev-tools startup HelloBlock, became CTO. Zhou, a crypto miner since 2014 and former early engineer at Uber and Checkr and staff engineer on Facebook AI's PyTorch infrastructure, rounded out the founding team as an engineering lead. Within roughly two months of launch the marketplace had done about $200M in trading volume, and within nine months it had captured roughly 92% share of NFT trading on Solana, with about 40,000 daily NFT transactions and 22 million unique monthly sessions -- by May 2022 its daily trading volume reportedly surpassed OpenSea's.

That rapid growth attracted institutional capital quickly: Magic Eden raised a Series A in early 2022 (investors reported to include Paradigm and Sequoia Capital, among others) and then, on June 21, 2022, announced a $130 million Series B at a $1.6 billion valuation, co-led by Greylock Partners and Electric Capital, with Greylock having also participated in the Series A. The company used the capital to expand beyond pure NFT trading -- partnering with Solana Labs on the Saga Web3 phone, building out a rewards program, launching an NFT creator-royalty protocol (later moving to an optional-royalty model under competitive pressure), and pushing into Web3 gaming, where it said it quickly captured over 90% of Solana gaming-NFT volume and hired former Glu Mobile/EA executive Chris Akhavan as its first Chief Gaming Officer.

From late 2022 through 2023, Magic Eden pursued aggressive multi-chain expansion and product breadth: it integrated Polygon-based NFTs (Nov 2022), launched a marketplace and creator launchpad for Bitcoin Ordinals inscriptions (Mar-Apr 2023) as Ordinals activity boomed, added BRC-20 token support (June 2023), rolled out an Ethereum marketplace beta (Mar 2023, later formalized in Feb 2024 with Yuga Labs), and partnered with MoonPay to let users buy NFTs by credit card (Feb 2023). The company also weathered setbacks typical of the volatile 2022-2023 crypto downturn: a January 2023 exploit allowed fake listings of high-value collections (Magic Eden committed to refunding affected users), and in February 2023 it laid off 22 employees (about 11% of staff) as part of a restructuring that CEO Jack Lu said was necessary to 'reach new goals.' Through 2023 the company kept building out its Games Hub and cross-chain wallet (entering beta by November 2023) and hired Linus Chung as Head of Product (July 2023).

Business model

Operates NFT marketplaces (primary and secondary) across multiple blockchains plus a crypto wallet and, following the 2025 Slingshot acquisition, cross-chain crypto/token trading infrastructure; also runs a gaming hub/launchpad and a venture arm (Magic Eden Ventures) that invests in Web3 game studios.

Transaction/marketplace fees on NFT trading volume (with an optional, later mostly-optional creator royalty model), plus fees from token/crypto trading via its wallet and trading-app products; company has also issued its own ME token.