You are now listening to Hotlong. I'm the host, Mabel Zhang. This show attempts to shed light on the broader Web3 community. The guests will include Web3 operators, investors, or ecosystem participants of other forms. The show will also have a special focus on the Asia-based Web3 world. Connect East and West. Enjoy the warmest Web3 conversation.

Hello everyone, welcome back to the latest episode of Hot Long. Today I'm excited to bring you the co-founder of Magic Eden, also a close friend of mine. Welcome to the show, Zee. Say hi to the audience. Hey Mabel, thanks so much for having me. It's awesome to be here. Finally, I started this invitation when I was running 51% and now after I had Sean from Lightspeed, now you're finally here.

Yeah, I feel like I've been nagging you for a long time to make this happen. Is that what it takes? No, no, no, no, no, no. It's not. Come on. I thought it was, you know, trying to make the timing when you actually released the Series B. I want to congratulations first for that closing.

No, I appreciate it. We're very fortunate, very thankful, super happy with the outcome. And yeah, we were lucky enough to announce it last week at NFT NYC. So all the timing kind of came together really, really well. Awesome. We can talk about that round of funding later on. But I guess before we start, tell us about your experience before co-founding Magic Eden.

Yeah, for sure. So I feel like you've been basically, you've seen this whole journey because we met each other very, very early, actually, when I first got into crypto. So I first got into crypto in early 2018. Around sort of like the late 2017, Q4 2017, I started doing a lot more like crypto.

digging and research and meeting people that were working in crypto. I was trying to figure out what someone with my background could do and add value in the space. My background before getting into crypto was a pretty traditional business background. So I worked at Bain for a number of years and I worked at a healthcare startup for a couple of years as well. And

at the time it was like very noisy because this was the around the peak of the last cycle

and it was really hard to tell what exactly like if you wanted to work in crypto what should you do um so i was lucky enough to have met a bunch of the early d5 builders around that time um so obviously antonio from dydx was one of them i met the zero x guys um the dharma guys you know there weren't that many people basically back then that were building something and um

um, got along really well with Antonio and, you know, he was looking for a kind of a right hand. Um, and, uh, he was just coming off a seed, a seed round. Um, I think he raised 2 million. Uh, and I just felt like I was very, very excited about the possibilities, uh, around, uh,

what could be done with some of this experimental technology. And it wasn't called DeFi back then. It was kind of just like, what could you imagine with some financial primitives? Could that work on Ethereum? It was kind of just like an interesting thought experiment. So I figured, why not? Let's just give this a go for a year. And then I ended up joining DYEX in 2019.

in 2018. um super fortunate to have had that experience i spent almost three years there um ran a lot of the the business and operational functions at the company and um saw d5 kind of rise you know gradually over 2018 2019 obviously it was very hard times and very different to how it is today and um

very fortunate to to see that industry kind of just develop into something uh that i feel like yeah has has amazing amazing traction and legs now and then i spent a year at coinbase uh as a product manager working on the institutional business so this is everything around um coinbase acquired to go to me building out everything around the prime brokerage service um so i spent about a year doing that and then yeah got the tap from

A couple of the guys, three of my friends who wanted to start Magic Eden. So we made the jump around October of last year.

That's awesome. Yeah, no, I remember that. So backstory for our listeners. So I knew Z actually from LinkedIn. We were both making the transition and I was researching who I should talk to before a trip I had to the US. And then I found Z on LinkedIn, seeing that this guy just jumped from, I think, Bang, was it?

to do IDX. And then that was probably your official first week.

at um dy dx and i remember we had that chat um at the coffee shop near your office and you introduced me to a bunch of people including i think that the guys from dharma and whatnot so that was that was that was kind of crazy to kind of think back but i was curious though like what made you choose um you know this decentralized derivative wasn't just kind of like more the liking of the founders or was it also something that you were thinking that derivatives

trading could be something very huge in the future? Yeah, so it's a few things and I was lucky to have gotten some really good advice at the time. So I think there were a few reasons that I decided to join. One was

I wanted to do something in the space and I really felt like it was hard to find structure in a lot of noise. And there were two things that stood out about DYDX. One was that Antonio had a lot of conviction. And for those of you out there listening who may have met Antonio or heard him speak, he's very clear conviction.

And that was something that I really just immediately resonated with. And the way he talked about it was that, hey, like, look, if we're going to rebuild

a financial system on crypto rails, then what has to happen? Well, there has to be spot market. That's basically the DEXs. And at the time that was 0x. And now there's Uniswap and many different flavors of that. And then secondly, there has to be credit markets. And then thirdly, there has to be then a whole set of other financial instruments, right? Like all kinds of derivatives.

So I just, that logic just made a lot of sense to me. And I was excited about the opportunity to work on that. You know, the thing that was unclear was how long that would take. Like, what was the timeframe in which these sorts of things could actually develop?

But for me, I was ready to take the punt and I was excited about it. And then the second thing outside of just the team and the idea was during that process, I was lucky to meet Steve Jang and Aviciiol, who are now both investors in Magic Eden. But they had a lot to do with sort of how I reasoned about why it would be a good idea to join DYDX at the time.

And their basic thinking were along the same lines. It was like, hey, join a team or a founder that you feel really good with. And two, it's not really about necessarily the specific idea.

It's more about if you believe and are excited about working in this space for the next 10 years, then you should jump in and ride that wave now. And I really felt in that moment that it was the perfect time, at least for me personally, to do that. And not everyone can take that kind of risk because I think, yeah, absolutely looking back on it, it definitely was quite a risk.

But I sort of was able to justify it, you know, just through the conversations I had with Antonio and then, you know, with some of the smart people around him.

No, yeah, I think what's definitely impressive was your thought of like first principle line of thinking, right? In terms of like what will be the primitives of DeFi market if there will be a market. I guess at that time, what I was kind of confused or uncertain was really about the performance of Ethereum. But then I guess later on in 2020 and 2020,

Onward, I started to realize that it's actually the yield that drives people. At the end of the day, people are here for the money. If they get enough incentives, to some extent, they will try to learn about a lot of the new paradigms. For example, SushiSwap offered that

the yield farming for LP, that's really, I think, a turning point of when people learn about how to provide liquidity in an AMM. So I think there are a lot of these kind of things that kind of just, you know, later on educated me. So I think, like, you definitely had...

I mean, I understand that you have a lot of unclarity on some of how the market structure will develop. I think the first principle thinking was always great. So I guess that kind of connects to my next question for you, which is what convinced you to take the bet on building an NFT marketplace and specifically starting with Solana?

I was a bit surprised at that time when you said you joined Coinbase, but then I was actually very excited to hear that you're going to do Magic Eden as a full-time. But curious to hear about your thought of thinking around the initial conviction. Yeah. Yeah, so I would say that for us, it wasn't so much around that we had our hearts set on building Coinbase.

and NFT marketplace for 12 months in the making. I'd be lying if I said that. I think it was more opportunistic. But over that period, initially when we were conceiving of the idea,

we developed conviction very, very quickly and very, very deeply that this was the right thing to build. So how did it kind of come together? It was basically my co-founder, Jack, he was working at FTX at the time. And in the early days of Solana, I think it's less so now, but definitely in the early days, the center of gravity around Solana was definitely influenced by FTX and the ecosystem around FTX. And

When he was there, he saw firsthand some of the really interesting things that were happening in the Solana ecosystem, which was generally fairly new to me. I had used some of the products that were getting built on Solana. So at the time, Solend had maybe just come out and

i knew the phantom guys from zero x and um you know but both of those things gave me conviction that you know builders that i knew from my days building in d5 on ethereum uh were moving across and trying things out on solana um so the combination of those things made us look into solana more deeply and at the time i i still remember the first time i sent a transaction on solana i i felt it was

just so simple and so easy to use. I hadn't had that feeling in a while because we'd just gone through DeFi summer where everything was impossible to send transactions online, right? So that was around the time, I think around the middle of last year. And

the NFT ecosystem on Solana back then was almost non-existent. I think there were maybe a handful of collections that launched, you know, they had a lot of trouble launching, took a long time to sell out, a lot of technical hiccups. But you could kind of see the green shoots of a pretty exciting ecosystem. And the conviction that we developed and the thesis that we developed Magic Eden around was the fact that

We believe that obviously there's a lot more experimentation to come on with NFTs. And, you know, most of the use case was still fairly one dimensional and,

uh we felt that a lot of that experimentation would happen on um some of the the faster um cheaper infrastructure that was developing on some of these other layer ones and we sort of you know saw what was happening firsthand on solana and decided to make the bet that um very intentionally that this was the the place that we would like start to build this company and the reason that i think that made sense at the time for us um

and proved to be the right decision was because experimentation cost is just really low. So therefore, more people are willing to come and drop collections, you know, buy their first NFT. You can enable, you know, pretty slick consumer experiences. And that really sat well with us because, you know, our founding team was basically myself and Jack, who are PMs. Jack was a PM at Google before FTX. And then Sid and Rex, who were both

um early engineers at uber eats so they've built you know consumer marketplaces from from the ground up and you know not just any consumer like you know one of the biggest ones in the world so this really felt like something that we we could tackle you know we had the right team to do this so um that's that's how we got started and that was around august when we kind of conceived of that and then we launched our first first version of the product in mid-september which

I think was around the time that we shared with you what we were working on. It was definitely a crowded market, that's for sure. It definitely wasn't a clear answer back then. No, I think you shared with me

I was probably the first one you reach out to because at that time you weren't raising, you were just kind of like, you know, trying to get an idea of what are like, get a pulse of the market and feel if it was the right timing and right thing to do. Honestly, like, you know, I, if I look back to my three years at Multicoin, I'd say what Magic Eden was my biggest miss, the seed round. Yeah.

But I think at the same time, it's hard to justify or like rationalize why investing in this because like, you know, I think even from you guys, you can't, you know, in the early days say like, why were you or better? You can only say I'm going to shift faster and whatever. But sometimes like for application layer, that's what you need and that's all you need.

But yeah, I mean, all in all, I think, you know, one of the big thing that I summarized internally was that never underestimate a group of very capable serial entrepreneurs, what they can learn and grow and within like, you know, four to six months, sorry, four to six weeks or so. So that was definitely a big lesson learned, I think, in early stage, you'll have to have some sort of conviction with the team and whatnot. But I do think that

At that time at Suwanna, there were quite a few people trying to experiment, but there's still not enough. I guess one of the bigger thing is that

At the end, this is a very large market if you think about it in five to 10 year space. And then there's no way that even if today there's open sea, sure, at that time there's a lot of art and whatnot. There's still plenty of room for other people to grow. And then whoever can outship other people will have a very high chance to win. And then that kind of early mover advantage can only compound. That's really one of the big lessons I had.

at that time yeah 100 yeah i really i really agree with that it's um dude yeah you got to look at this in multi multi-year and multi-cycle time horizons um so much changes in even a short amount of time like we're only nine months old of the company so we're under no illusions that

like you know none of us believe that this is this is the end state this is this is just the beginning so um we have to absolutely like move with the industry and um there's so much more to do it feels like everything is kind of in the same bucket of things right now because the you know the market is small and we're in a bit of a fishbowl but um just look how quickly that like the d5 ecosystem grew from nothing in 2018 to

you know pretty big you know just two three years later um so in a five-year time horizon um yeah it's almost inconceivable uh what what some of the things will end up you know working or use cases that will get popular like what what us as a marketplace will mean i think a lot of those things will be quite interesting

Indeed. So now that you've built this company for nine months, to your point, how would you summarize your longer term goal that you want to achieve from building this marketplace and maybe your mission and vision? Yeah. So I think the way we think about Magic Eden is we want to effectively be the destination where, um,

you know anyone can create own discover uh anything that pertains to digital culture right that's like the you know the almost like the vision statement that we have for ourselves and the the barometer that we have internally and what does that mean i feel like you know today if you look at um nft marketplaces or what what do you what do you imagine when someone says nfp marketplace

it doesn't conjure up a very inspiring image, right? People think about a set of cards on a page that you can browse and then you can like, you know, send a transaction to buy or sell the thing. And that's a very, it's a very, you know, similar type of mental model to marketplaces in Web2, right? It's sort of what we all grew up using, right?

with you know something like ebay or uh marketplaces like that right exactly and that's you know that that satisfies what i what i kind of describe as the commerce layer of a marketplace right um the thing that you know enables people to make the the transaction uh at the point of sale i think that's what marketplaces have become very good at so far when it comes to entities

And, you know, us is where we're in the same boat too so far. But I think if we're successful in the long term, we should be more than that. We should be a lot more than that. There should be many layers to the marketplace where we want to be involved in the entire user journey. So not only at the point of transaction, but that whole discovery journey, the research journey,

you know, for some people, for pro users, that might be analytics. That entire journey, I think, is really important. And today, that's an extremely important

I would say fragmented journey and probably one of the reasons, not the only reason, but one of the reasons that makes it really hard for, you know, normal users, quote unquote, to come in, just start doing something casually with NFTs. Like I think NFTs today is not a casual thing. You've got to be pretty deep into it to,

to really derive a lot of fun and excitement and value. And that shouldn't be the case in the future. And then on the creator side, I think that the same is true. We want to obviously help make that easier for creators through their entire journey. Not just the point of the drop or not just supporting them as a secondary marketplace. So there should be many layers to the Magic Eden experience. There should be

you know a community layer maybe there's um different experiences laid on for different categories maybe there's social layers um all these things i think uh what i hope magic eden uh will be in the in the future and you know today you know it's still early so we very much serve that you know what i mentioned earlier around like the point of sale the transaction um but i think there's an opportunity to do a lot more than that

Very interesting. That actually ties back to what I've been thinking about in terms of why people are going to... So today, they're buying NFT primarily because of trying to make money, right? You have to admit that. There's such component there. But longer term, I've been always thinking about why or what drives people to continuously spending money on NFTs. And what you said about casual spending, are

Are you kind of referring to some sort of digital experiences and then as people are enjoying the kind of digital experiences, they make the purchase? Or are there any other thoughts that you have for that? That's definitely one flavor of where this can go. For me, I really think about it more as the, what does the creator want to do, right? And we actually think about that as the markets. Like, I think some people think about,

you know go to market on you know a particular chain and and that's like you know these are the different segments or the different markets that i want to be a part of or that i want my business to to run on we think about it as the what are the categories of creators and

uh today you know if the category is pfps then yeah i think the use case is is buying and selling to to flex right and to speculate um and but i think that's different for different categories and one of the things you'll see or you'll hopefully notice on magic eden is that uh there's there's room that we've created for different types of experiences uh and some experiences don't cost anything

For example, we have a section called Eden Games that allows users to play and discover browser-based games that are currently live. And these are totally free to play. Users can just start playing them. It has nothing to do with... You wouldn't even know that there's any NFTs that are a part of these different games. The whole intention is to...

bring some sense of immersion into the marketplace experience that doesn't require any semblance of transactions. And then if the user wants to do something, upgrade a weapon, buy a new skin, stuff that they would ordinarily do with

games that they play outside of crypto or Web3, then there's obviously the ability to do that on Magic Eaton too. And that's like one example. Another example could be we recently did a few things with a company called Overtime, which is like a Gen Z sports brand focused on basketball. And we ran some casual competitions around NBA playoffs and March Madness.

and these are just you know fun social things that uh if you want to participate you can purchase certain nfts to be a part of it but if you didn't want to there's a whole bunch of stuff you can just just check out casually and we're really interested in doing things like that um

because i think that's like pushing the boundaries of of entities beyond what people think about when they think of nfts today which is you know effectively a profile picture um so yeah over time there's probably some spectrum where there's you know pay to play immediately there's you know some kind of like free to play type use cases um and then maybe there's some something in between maybe there's some interactions that

that between users and communities and creators where there's some tipping or like that kind of thing, right? Obviously none of those things have broad usage today in Web3, but we're pretty excited that this is the kind of innovation that I think we're really excited to see. And as a marketplace that prides itself on being the first to support these types of things, like we hope to be there for those use cases.

For sure. So one of the things that I wanted to kind of like get away a little bit from what we've been talking about and just, you know, further expand on a lot of people's exploration on Web3 social. So I think a lot of people were trying to build social experiences on top of the NFT collections. But I think one of the key thing that's missing is

is that other than the ethos or maybe the value behind the NFT collections of a specific, I don't know, like PFP projects or whatever, there's not much other thing that are being kind of shared by the community members. So I feel like the key to kind of tackle that is actually find some sort of activities

for people to commonly go to one place and repetitively do that every day. And then people will have shared common developed interests from that activity. And then they will start to have a...

kind of community or whatever around that and that's like kind of the you know beginning point of the web3 social that we could see and then all the nft spending nft consumption around that will become the final value capture of whatever um that i've just been describing so i feel like in that sense that's the kind of like casual nft spending where you basically are trying to

crystallize almost a lot of these experiences and then these kind of common shared interests of the groups so that people are willing to pay for that, not just based on some sort of vague shared value on top of a PFP project, but rather it's like the shared experiences and common memories and whatnot.

So I thought that's kind of like one way I see how this will go. I don't know how, like what exactly, what specific activity it is going to be like. Maybe, you know, today StepN is like kind of organizing the moving component of it. And then maybe like, you know, people will start with, you know, having some relationship with the app and then say like, I'm going to have, you know, go out, run every day. And then the next step will become like a group of people going out and run together, right?

So the relationship between it becomes like from the user and the application to the users to users. So I think that's kind of like you develop more sophisticated relationships. And then on top of the relationships, you will have more spending. And then I think, you know, any NFT marketplace is very well prepared to capture those. Yeah, super interesting. I think.

We think of it in a similar way in that, yeah, I think generally, you know, social, the

for NFTs or social and Web3 is going to look pretty different. At least from what we've seen, a lot of the, you know, social first kind of products that have been built haven't had a lot of traction because they're trying to kind of, yeah, fit existing Web2 social into this stuff. And I'm just not sure it really fits exactly like that. You know, it's kind of part of the reason why I feel like

the Coinbase NFT marketplace has struggled a little bit from a traction standpoint because

It's not sort of the way that I think users today want to consume NFTs. It may be in the future, but it doesn't really fit, I think, the core use cases today. So I feel like the way we would approach it is... And, like, yeah, we don't have any... We haven't done anything on the social front, so I'm not, you know... This is definitely not, like, a core focus area of ours. I'm sort of just spitballing for the fun of it. But the way I think we would think about it is...

yeah really try and identify where are the areas around the marketplace that have the most kind of like density of interactions and that i think honestly looks pretty different depending on the type of entity that um is supported on the platform and uh only then when you have like a good picture of that then you can start to build you know or experiment with like social experiences around it so one example that we did uh recently experiment with

which went actually better than we thought, was we have these launch pads on Magic Eden where we partner with creators to launch their NFT collections. And we spun up an experiment to just support live chat during the actual minting event. And I think it was something like 10,000 concurrent users just in this live chat.

just going for it, chatting about the collection, chatting about all things NFTs, crypto, which is really cool to see. It's sort of this really fun, it's event driven, it's a very specific event. Yeah, high sort of excitement value. And yeah, we thought that was a really cool thing. It means it's something that we don't exactly know what, but we're very excited to tap into this some more.

It is an emotional premium, I think, to the users who participated in that bidding experience. Not that all of them will be so lucky to mint, but then at least for some of them who participated in the process, that's just very unique. I think that's also, although it's not really captured by the NFT prize, but then at the end, I think it's part of why people will come back for more spending and purchases. I think that's very pivotal.

Yeah, 100%. So what's your view on, I guess like social and gaming is kind of relevant, right? Like, because like people all have some sort of relationship and interaction with people. Well, in some games, it's just like not PvP, but rather like you're playing with the game itself. But still, I know gaming has been a kind of a focus for you guys. Yeah.

Out of curiosity though, I think one challenge that you might have been seeing is that the game developers might want to build the marketplace themselves rather than settling on Magic Eden. So from what angle did you plan to cut into that market and then get more integration?

Yeah. Great, great question. Yeah. So, so we have spent a lot of time diving into the gaming space at Magic Eden. So we have like a dedicated gaming team actually. And we're going to announce this actually in the next, I think a couple of weeks, but we just hired a, a, a new member of the team, Tony, who's going to be leading gaming investments and partnerships. So he,

he's been doing basically gaining investments at Tencent for the last four years. So we see this as like a very critical hire for us to

number one, be able to navigate the best set of game developers and studios who are building in Web3, and then two, build relationships with them very, very early in their journey. But anyway, to answer your question, I think there's actually a number of ways that we will end up working with games. I think you correctly identified the marketplace

infrastructure is one way uh absolutely i think that we've actually heard quite quite good feedback from from games that uh and this is i think especially true in a bear market where runways are shorter and everyone's trying to preserve the cash so therefore resources are at an all-time high premium so a lot of these teams want to invest as much of their resource and developer time into building core gameplay and um

that's something that really sits quite well with our expertise because we can then look after all the other stuff which is anything that touches the chain anything that touches transactions any marketplace functionality that the game might need can all be powered by Magic Eaton so we have about 15 games that

we have signed up to be part of kind of like a alpha program where we're going to be effectively powering all of their marketplaces. And we see this as a pretty big opportunity and area of focus for us going forward. Then there's other parts of the journey too. So, you know, as a game developer that's coming into Web3 for the first time, there's obviously a lot around like

web three go to market and I would classify, you know, NFT launches, um, you know, uh, marketing to a web three native audience. Um, these things are, I think unique to the challenges of, of building web three for the first time. And we have a lot of expertise around that because we, we, you know, we've launched a lot of projects on magic Eden. We, uh, that's just a core capability of ours. And then I think the third thing is, um,

a more deep, a deeper integration with these games, you know, to sort of the earlier point around, let's let these games focus on core gameplay. The marketplace isn't the only thing that they need. And there's actually a lot of different Web3 elements that we want to abstract away from the game developers themselves. And, you know, I think there's a lot of things, you know,

you know, around that space that we hope to support some of these games with. So yeah, that's sort of the early picture today. And the challenge right now is I think a lot of these games are not live. So they're also figuring out their tech stacks and there's a lot of variables in the mix. But we're pretty excited that, you know, a lot of these games want to build, you know, this open future with us.

where a lot of the items are going to be freely tradable and they want a strong go-to-market and tech partner alongside them as they go to market with their game. And I think Magic Eden is the perfect partner.

So you touch upon on some of the other some of the aspects outside of the marketplace, which is like discovery and even just kind of like I wouldn't say curation, but definitely like helping them to find the right audiences and then make their name, given that there's a lot of a lot of competition right now in the space as well. So that that was a good point.

Related to this discussion, though, so Kyle from Multicoin, he wrote an article about the verticalization of NFT marketplace. So in which he challenges the existence of general purpose NFT marketplace and

So basically TL;DR for our audiences. In that article, Kyle's point was about he thinks in the future a lot of these IPs like Bored Apes and maybe there are some other like Solana Monkey Business and whatnot, they will have their own, launch their own infrastructure, meaning the marketplace that kind of customized to the user experience that they want to offer to their community members.

And then instead, people might not really go to the generalized marketplace, which is represented by, I guess, Magic Eden or OpenSea and whatnot. What's your view on this? I'm curious. Kyle, why is he calling us out? Eden? No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding. It was a good article. A really, really good article. I think...

so i agree with a lot of the some of the tenants there actually that there is a lot of room for um verticalized marketplaces uh that's was also true in web 2 right where you know you have the really large you know e-commerce uh style marketplaces then you have

secondhand marketplaces, then you have arts and craft marketplaces. All of these actually became very large companies. So I think in general, what I think this says is that the landscape is huge and there's a ton of value creation potential here. I think the way that we approach this problem is that it's always better to start broad than narrow, especially when the use cases are not clear yet.

And that's why I think you've seen success with things like OpenSea and Magic Eden and not that much success with

super, super, super verticalized marketplaces like a Hoku or a Fractal, right? Not to say that they won't carve out something big. It's of course, like we're still so early in the market. But I do think that one of the reasons that games want to work with us, for example, is because we have the broad-based user distribution that comes with being a large platform.

and why are we a large platform is because we started off broad rather than narrow and only then can you uh take take that broad user base and distribution and then offer that to specific use cases right so we are doing that now with gaming and we're saying hey we're going to build this thing called eden games which is a gaming vertical within magic eaton

So it's a specific vertical where you can discover games, browse games, view gaming related content that looks and feels really different to browsing and discovering PFPs. And then on the other side,

we can then work with game developers and tell them and say to them hey you know because we we have a general marketplace infrastructure and a broad user base this is the best place for you to actually acquire game players um which is you know ultimately the most important thing that you care about when it comes to building a game so while i do agree that there will be extremely verticalized niche experiences i don't think we're there yet and uh as a result like i expect

for us as a broader, larger, more general marketplace today,

we should keep an eye out for what are these use cases that do get a lot of traction because it means that we need to support those better. But we're not going to do that for every, you know, nth degree of niche marketplace or niche use case, because I just don't think it's realistic and those will be opportunities for others to build. And I think they, you know, there could be some big opportunities there, but we're not going to, you know, build all that stuff on day one, because I think,

it'd be silly to not have the focus, right? So we're sort of starting broad, betting deep on probably a handful of categories over time and building the best experiences we think we can rather than building a ton of verticalized stuff. And the bet for us is that that brings us a lot of users

And then we will offer a lot of the marketplace infrastructure that powers a lot of these verticalized experiences or certain companies who want to build their own verticalized experiences, you know, like in-game marketplaces. Like that's the types of deals that we have lined up over the next six months to power those. So that's sort of how we think about the space. I don't think there's a right answer. You know, I think.

Carl's always been really good at just putting out a thesis, right? And then, yeah, let's see what eventuates. But that's sort of how we think about it internally. Yeah, no, I think you had a very interesting point about having the bootstrapping first and then...

And then, so I have always been a big fan of do things on scale. I think, you know, building out some specific functions that, you know, if, you know, some game developer asked for it and then you want to provide them a Shopify experience, the key thing is to

probably like, you know, at the beginning, just build out all of those features. And then later on, you summarize and see like, okay, which one is probably the more needed ones and you kind of just productize it. But I think, you know, you pointed out a very, like a more important point, which is like you need the initial bootstrapping to make every, the whole flywheel start to run. Otherwise, it's not going to be, yeah,

anything that would have a large traction. Because at the end, you do need a lot of people as an entry point. And then you start to filter out, okay, what are some of the specific needs that you can cater to for different people?

different types of audience within your your group of people so i think you had a very good point that i actually never thought about i mean it's kind of self-evident and obviously it's also not very easy to kind of just like bootstrapping people um but i guess like you guys shipped very fast and that that was one of the edge that you had to do to get to do that i appreciate that yeah um yeah ultimately yeah just gotta gotta move quickly um but no i think

We'll see what happens. It's still very early. So some of these theses around verticalization could still play out. Yeah. And also, I think the other thing is just that once you become a cash printer of a generalized marketplace, do you still try to think hard on what are some of the verticals that you should work on? I think that's a big thing that maybe some of the other competitors are not really doing.

So on the topic of competition, how do you think of that? I guess like verticalized marketplace you've kind of already mentioned. How about some of the other like generalized marketplace? How do you think yourself kind of out-compete them or say like become more dominant in the future?

Yeah, I think ultimately we, I really consider Magic Eden to be a much more, so outside of the specific deep vertical bets that we will make, which I feel like we're probably the only large general marketplace that's doing that. I also feel like we are the most community centric marketplace.

I feel like permeates everything that we do. All the product decisions that we make, the decisions that impact users, we'll always pick our users over Magic Eden. And I think there's many instances where we've had to do that and do it very publicly. But I think that's important because we...

we have effectively, you know, think about one of the first things we built as a product was actually was Launchpad. And why did we build Launchpad? It was because it was unbelievably hard to launch a collection on Solana back in September. And, you know, I think creators were paying...

you know, anonymous devs 30, 40, 50% of the mint just to get that started. So we wanted to build, you know, a creator experience and a creator portal that allowed creators to come and do that fairly easily and almost self-serve, right? That whole sort of thing around being really, really focused on the community is something that is really important for us. So, you know, that combined with

the way I think we think about, you know, NFTs as categories and how we want to serve those use cases in the future. I think ultimately we hope that it puts us in a category of one. But yeah, as I said in the sort of early stages, it feels like everything is very intensely competitive at the moment. And I think in the short term, that's probably true because the market is small. But over time, I think you'll see a lot of this diverge. For sure.

Well, I mean, like kind of like hearing you describing this kind of reminded me of the smooth journey you had since last fall. I have to say.

you're like, you're doing all the things right. And at the same time, you're also very, very lucky. Well, I felt bad to say this myself, but you know, you know, coming from someone who seeing it from the first day, I definitely felt so. So I do want to kind of congratulate you guys on that. But was there any obstacle you face that you consider like a major one? Or maybe are there any challenges that you foresee become significant in the future?

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It may look like a successful, smooth ride from the outside, but I guarantee you

you know, we've gone through all of the normal, crazy, unpredictable, scary stuff that, you know, most startups go through, except we went through it in a very, very compressed timeline, which made it all the more, you know, both fun, but also, you know, fairly stressful at the same time. I think there's definitely some challenges.

I'll name a couple that we had. I think we went through two waves of really, really bad reliability problems at Magic Eden just because we just couldn't keep up with the traffic and the load that was hitting the site. Once was in around January or February and then another was just last month in June. Both cases required some pretty serious work

Yeah, I think, you know, in for a surgery from our engineering team and, you know, they're amazing. Yeah, work night and day to kind of get things to back to where they should be.

The other one that I'll call out is, you know, this is very public. We had like a pretty high profile rug on the marketplace in February called Bloonsville. And yeah, this was a very existential moment for us, I think. This is one of those really, really classic cases of what are you going to do? Are you going to put your users first? Are you going to put Magic Eden first? And, you know, this wasn't something that

you have a lot of time to think about because i remember pretty distinctly this happened uh i think around in the morning or around the middle of the day u.s time and at the time me myself and the other co-founders we were all in australia so you know we were it was the middle of the night it was two or three in the morning um and a lot of these a lot of this was happening very very quickly so you know the project rugged it was very public

it you know they were i think very purposely um uh very nasty towards magic and our team and individual team members and um we were basically front and center in the community and kind of copying it pretty badly uh just to as an understatement and the choice we made at that moment was it was very clear it was we would refund the users uh out of our own treasury um

We also put money directly back into the project, Balloonsville, and helped organize a community, a set of community members to take it forward and derug the project. And at the same time, we then paused Launchpad for almost a month to fix all of the operational and trust and safety problems that resulted to there being a rug.

And we introduced all of our projects that would have launched in Magic Eaton with competitor launchpads. And that was really hard to do. That was like months of work from our sales team,

uh bd team to get those deals but you know we always do what is best for the user in this case both the creator and and the traders who are trading on the platform so um we would do exactly the same thing again but these are like examples where it's very very challenging and in the moment uh felt very existential but i think we made the right decision and um

I'm sure we'll face more of this kind of stuff in the future. I'm sure we'll have more reliability problems. I'm sure there's going to be other crazy stuff that happens on Magic, even that we can't foresee. I'm sure there will be internal team things as we scale, like most startups do. We've gone from zero to 105 employees in nine months. And that also is something that we are...

coming to terms with and figuring out how to work together and going through that process. But it's all fun. I say all these things in a way that is, we're very privileged to be on this journey and very lucky to actually have the community to thank for that. So hopefully there's a lot more to come, both ups and downs. We'll take it all.

Yeah, I know. You guys are definitely grinders. There's no question around that. And I do think, though, in this space, so previously we had some sort of informal thesis that we had inside Multicoin. Obviously, we have the formal thesis for Web3 whatsoever. But one of those informal ones being

investment into people who are doing stuff. As simple as that. It was summarized as do stuff thesis. But the key thing is about you have to constantly deliver and then you have to constantly make noise that you are delivering. You can't miss either side of the thing because you can't be just doing things but then not telling people but at the same time you can't be just bragging but then not doing anything. Do stuff thesis always works super well.

Yeah, it's a really good way to put it. It's a simple one. Yeah. So I guess now it's the time for me to ask you about the Series B. I guess, you know, first of all, how do you plan to use the proceeds? And also, I think one of the things that people would be interested in is how do you pick investors and what do you optimize for?

Yeah. Okay, so I'll answer the first one. How do we aim to use the proceeds? So why don't we continue to grow the team? We're fortunate to be in a position where we can continue to grow the team, obviously responsibly and not recklessly. But there's a few key functional experts, key hires that we want to make. Number two is we want to invest more heavily into

that core end-to-end NFT journey. So we want to be more involved in that end-to-end user discovery all the way through to trading. And then on the creator side, a more fully fledged creator service, creator portal type offering. Those are things we will continue to invest in. I consider that to be sort of the bread and butter of the Magic Eden business.

And then the second thing is going deep into certain verticals. And we've talked a lot about gaming on this particular pod. But that is the first deep vertical experience we want to make a bet on. And part of the funding will go towards growing that team

Plus just investing in general around building out some core infrastructure that will hopefully support games more deeply. And then, yeah, I think we're keeping a close eye on some of the other, other verticals as well. And then number three is we'll be, we've mentioned this in a lot of the press that came out, but cross chain expansion is something we're very interested in. So while,

Solana has been and will continue to be sort of the core home base, so to speak, for us. It is clear that we are

going to be slash already in a multi-chain world and that I expect that to continue at least for the sort of foreseeable future. So as a result, then, you know, we're a very practical company. We want to go where our users are going to be. So if the users are going to be on different chains and, you know, different use cases develop on different chains, I think Magic Eden needs to be there too. And then, yeah, so your second part, how do we pick our investors?

yeah we're super lucky to to have the opportunity to work with a lot of investors and uh ultimately the biggest thing that we looked for was who do we want to just partner with who do we feel comfortable partnering with for you know the next 10 years right because that's the sort of time horizon that that these things um operate on and um

That sort of relationship was really important for us. And in the end, so I think Electric and Greylock led our round and we brought in Lightspeed as another large anchor investor. And we were super excited about that. I've known Avicil since before I joined DYDX and

he's, I think he's one of the best thinkers and also one, one of our biggest supporters. He was, he was also in our previous round. And then same with Greylock. We think, we think that they're just, you know, they've had our backs basically since the beginning and couldn't, couldn't be more excited to be working really closely with them. And then

And then Lightspeed, yeah, they're obviously, you know, amazing name and deep expertise in all things kind of consumer and gaming. So having them around is awesome. And that's sort of the main sort of way we thought about it, having that, you know, really, really amazing people around

deep conviction in our corner that matters most above anything else. Sounds like you definitely optimize a lot on in terms of trust and, you know, just long term relationship, which which I think it's a great thing to do. Like oftentimes, I think some people optimize for the names, but at the end, it's like who you can actually work closely with. So I'm definitely on your side.

I guess at the end, we'd love to just chat with you on the future plans. What do you plan to focus on in the next few quarters? There's quite a few things. So I think I expect to see Madge Eaton on more than just Solana from a chain perspective. Number two, I think I expect a lot more announcements and...

yeah, information and noise around our just things we're doing in gaming. I think, you know, we've been fairly not quiet, but we haven't been as public about some of that over the last couple of months, just because we've been focused on a lot of the core reliability, core infrastructure kind of pieces.

So I think, yeah, we're hoping to share a lot more around like what is that gaming offering? What are the things that you would get as a game developer working with Magic Eden? And yeah, so that's one very exciting set of news that I think hopefully will come out fairly soon.

And then, no, I think, you know, we're obviously entering a bit of a bear market at the moment. And I, yeah, I think it's a really good time to consolidate, you know, build, continue to build the stuff that is core to the roadmap and continue to just stay focused. You know, in many ways, like,

the whole time we've been working on Magic Eden, the last nine months, it's like been drinking out of a fire hose. It's been crazy. So I actually think this is a really good opportunity for us and the team, and hopefully this is true for many others in the ecosystem, just take stock of what's been done

and figure out what's the core things on the roadmap that just no matter what you'll keep grinding on. And for us, that's core marketplace.

creator experience, gaming, cross-chain. Those are things that I think we will just do no matter what. So I feel like, yeah, in this sort of market, just heads down. So yeah, we're very excited. We're in a good position and hopefully we can just continue to crunch on all those things.

I know what a luxury to have, you know, having cash on the bank account and then be able to just like have a bunch of people built with you. That's more than exciting. Um, let's, uh, step in, step in too, man.

Okay, thank you for that. No, like for a second, when I heard you said consolidate, I always thought you were going to do some acquisition or like merger or whatever. Well, maybe that's on the roadmap. We don't know, right? We'll see. But this is super exciting. Is that an offer from Stacey Lodal?

um please don't tell just kidding um no i i think i think this is a super interesting conversation to have i definitely also learned a lot you know even if we spend a lot of time chatting i still felt like you know a lot of things that you shared you know during the conversation kind of educated me or enlightened me quite a bit so thank you for the time talking to us and and to our audience yeah no i really appreciate it mabel thanks so much for having me on and

Thanks for, you know, you've been such a good supporter of not just me and our whole team. So big, big thanks on behalf of all of us for being, yeah, just such a good, good supporter, good friend of the company. Pleasure. Pleasure is mine. All right. Thank you. Have a good one. Bye. Bye.