Fungible Times | Magic Eden

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from Greylock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at Greylock. Today we're sharing another episode from our friends at Fungible Times, the podcast from Greylock investors Sarah Goa, Christine Kim and Mike Dubois, where they Discuss All Things Web 3. Their guests are the co founders of Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. In less than six months, Magic Eden has risen to more than a billion dollars in secondary trading volume and currently holds more than 95% share of the Solana ecosystem. The company just raised $27 million in Series A funding and the Greylock team is proud to be among their investors. You can find more episodes of Fungible Times by subscribing on SoundCloud, Spotify, Apple, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also check out their website, fungibletimes xyz. With that, I'll turn the show over to Fungible Times.

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of Fungible Times. I'm your host, Christine, and Mike is here. And today we have our guests, Zed and Jack. Jack will be joining us shortly from the NFT Marketplace. Oh, Jack is here. Jk Jack and Zed here now on the NFT Marketplace, Magic Eden. So we're super excited to have you guys on. Thank you guys for coming having us guys.

You guys have been awesome since we met. So super happy to be joining and hanging out together.

For those of you that don't know, Magic Eden is an NFT marketplace, like I said, built on Solana. It is the number one marketplace on Solana and it's number two overall behind opensea. You guys have been growing like crazy. It's pretty amazing to see you guys grow just since you guys have launched a couple months ago. It's a super fast, super cheap experience. Experience. 0% listing fee, 2% transaction fees, of course, with all the benefits that Solana has. Super fast, low gas, everything like that. The mission for Magic Eden is to be the home for the next generation of digital creators with tools like Launchpad, which we will talk about today, and their focus on unique use cases like gaming, which we will also talk about. So without further ado, let's jump into the pod. Our first section always is explain to me like I'm five, where we kind of keep give the background to our users about what it is you work on, explain the basics before we dive into the next set of topics. So first question here is what are NFTs and what is the Role of an NFT marketplace like Magic Eden.

If I stab and then Jack can jump in. But yeah, first of all, super happy to be here, really excited to talk about this, I think. What is an nft? So NFT stands for non Fungible Token. It's basically just like a unique digital asset is sort of how I describe it. And it's like as simple as the analogy that seems to resonate with my family, at least to a super boomer, super non crypto native is like, hey, what is the reason why you collect anything in the world, whether it's baseball cards or collect Lego, whatever it is, as a kid or otherwise. And usually it's because a you think it's really cool, you think it's special, you attach some sort of, you know, benefit to it that's emotional. Right. And I think what NFTs layer on is kind of all of those, all of those elements that I think are very primal and very normal in humans, but also layer on this sort of like really, you know, dynamic online community element to all of those things. And we're just scratching the surface here. I think what is an NFT can kind of like shatter like a lot of boundaries, which I think we'll get into with like gaming and things like that. But fundamentally the stuff that really took off this year is like, hey, here is a digital asset that is rare or has some scarcity to it and it allows you to be part of this online community that may tweak your interest in some way, whether it's like they're interested in talking about certain things they're interested in, have similar interests to you, whatever it is. So I think that's sort of how I would describe what is an nft. And that's what we've seen take off in recent times.

And so for many consumers, like their first time interacting with this technology will be through a marketplace like a Magic Eden or OpenSea or a handful of others out there, or kind of an integrated marketplace into a project like NBA Top Shot. What makes Magic Eden different from other marketplaces out there?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think we think about the product in a few different ways. I think like, number one, we have this principle of definitely bringing a super polished and kind of immersive experience. So today we're probably only at step one of that journey, but we have much more aspirational plans around design and the user experience and kind of the core spirit behind that is NFTs should be like the future of art and should be the Future of culture on the Internet. Right. And the way that you experience so many of these new types of media. And we want to create an experience where users feel immersed, they feel inspired by this new type of media and we want to bring that to life. And we've got a couple examples of that in our website now where we have gaming partners and you can buy the nft, but you can play the game as well within the marketplace itself. So you can really experience the value that some of these new digital assets.

Can bring to you.

So I think that's the first one. And then the second tenant of this would be we believe in bringing our product to the users. We don't have to have all of the users come to us. So we have this kind of philosophy around, like maybe Magic Eden should be thought more as a network rather than as like a first party app. And so we have done a couple of initiatives around like putting our app inside other major consumer apps where, you know, that type of audience will find our functionality or feature is relevant. So one of the latest examples of that would be like, now you can have Magic. Now you can experience Magic Eden inside Exodus, like one of the biggest consumer cross chain wallets with 6 million users or so. So those users can come into the Exodus wallet and experience the Magic Eden experience. And we've got a couple of other examples of that where for example, Raydium, which is kind of like the Uniswap of Solana, those users can also experience Magic Eden NFT experience within the Radium experience as well.

Yeah, other than that, I mean we have a core first party app and I think like, yeah, best user experience. All the things that Christine was mentioning at the beginning that is really important to us, it's like, what is that experience to make it as easy and seamless as possible. And I think we all felt this way when we first started using stuff on Solana. It's like the instant delight of being able to send transactions quickly. The instant delight of being able to just do things, do things fast and cheaply. So we feel like all of those tenets resonate really well with a consumer app that we're building. And ultimately it's like a consumer app with social elements, with community elements, with underlying crypto elements and web three elements. But we're kind of combining all those things to make it a really nice experience. Hopefully.

So many themes that I would love to dig into during today's conversation, but I feel like at a meta level, the things that is the thing that's cool about Nfts and this aspect of interoperability and being able to use it in a lot of different environments and the fact that you can own your game assets, like, that's just one theme that I think makes NFTs cool. But it's interesting that you guys are also incorporating that into your product vision in how you operate and collaborate with other interfaces or other applications like Wallets or Radium. Big fan of what they're working on as well, so that's awesome. As users are listening to this podcast, I'm sure that some of them are going to wonder how they get started on Magic Eden or how did they buy their first nft? So what are some of the tools, you know, wallets or things that a user would need to get started? I have been in the seat of trying to get people onboarded onto the space, and typically the first thing that they want to do is buy an nft.

Love to hear it. Yeah, I think the first thing you need is just a wallet, right? A wallet that supports Solana and Phantom. You know, good friends with those guys. They're the biggest wallet on Solana at the moment. That's the most common way that people access Magic Eden. Soon we'll have a mobile app which will be hopefully a more delightful and easy way to access Magic Eden, which we can talk about a little bit later on. But really, it's just a wallet. You need some soul and then you're ready to get going, and then you're in this weird and wonderful world of, like, collections and communities on Twitter and Discord and hopefully on Magic Eden too, where you're discovering new and wonderful things. I still, like, even today, I land a Magic Eden every day and I'm like, oh, my God, there's so many things to look at. There's so many things to consume. There's so many things to just learn about. And that, for me is the most exciting thing. And the beauty of it is that, yeah, I think it's just have a wallet, have some soul, and you're good to go. And I think we'll hopefully make that experience a lot easier over time so that, you know, you don't even need to. Need to go through those steps. But, yeah, that's the. That's the experience today.

And I'll probably add one thing. Like, I think, like, sometimes for users, you want to have them feel this, like, emotional rush right from your product. That's when, like, it really feels, you know, they're getting super psyched and super excited for that. So, like, Launchpad Our primary mint product where users can get something from the creator for the first time. The creator is dropping something to the community. First time. That really feels to me like an emotional kind of apex moment where people, there's a countdown, it's like a New Year's countdown, right? They're like, oh, when is this mint going to drop? And then they know it's going to be a race to mint something and get something really exciting. And I feel like that could be a pretty interesting and pretty impactful entry point for users to experience NFTs on Magic Eden for the first time.

So how about if you flip to the other side of the marketplace and talk about the creator side for a moment? High level, like, what's the end process to create Mint? Start selling your first NFTs as a creator on Magic Eden.

Hopefully it's fairly seamless. I mean, one of the things that we're really interested in building and we've started to build already is like, and I think, like a lot of people don't see this. It's sort of the unsexy stuff, right? Which is like tooling. Ultimately, it's creative tooling. And we're like, you know, like complete, complete and utter, like, you know, fans of just making things easy for both sides of the, of the marketplace, right? So on the, on this tooling side, it's like, hey, like, creators don't want to interact with contracts and programs. Like, that's not something they should have to do, right? It should be as easy as, you know, like how the same way that people like post things on Instagram or, you know, send each other files, right? It's like, it shouldn't be some weird convoluted process that requires code. So the experience there in Magic Eden is actually pretty straightforward and I think there's a lot more we can do. But it's basically, you know, obviously the creative conceptual process is all on the creator side. They figure out what they want to do, how they want to engage their community, you know, what it is that they actually want to drop. And then once those files are ready, like whether it's a video, whether it's an MP4, whether it's like a JPEG file, PNG, send that across to Magic Eden and imagine it's like, it's almost like a Google Drive Dropbox experience where you drag and drop files into, into a certain place, right? And then you specify like, yep, this is the name of the collection. These are the parameters around it. It's going to cost one soul. There's a thousand items and it's happening on this day and that's it, that's the experience. So as a creator, it's like, it's almost stepping through like a very, very clean flow. And then we're really keen to build actually a whole bunch of things around that. So like, the creator creates this collection, engages their community, and then there's probably some sort of tooling and dashboard that allows them to like manage a lot of these collections. Right. How do they then engage the different members of each of these communities where they've dropped NFTs to? And then it becomes a little bit more social. Right? And I think those are different areas that get really, really interesting and really fun because it's not just, you know, marketplaces today are just like commerce, right? People think about marketplaces like I go there to buy and sell. But that's true for a lot of like consumer goods, typically in Web2. But that is not what NFTs are. I think NFTs may feel that way today just because they started off as like something you can buy and sell. But that's like the actual very naive use case. The real use case here is actually like, how do you engage communities and build communities? And these are elements and layers that I think live on top of the marketplace and become like, make it a really, really rich experience.

So this is probably a good jumping off point to some of, like the deeper, you know, some of the deeper dives. There's a few areas that we'd love to, you know, really double click on here now that we're past the. Explain to me like I'm five part of the, part of the program. But you know, one of the tensions with, with I think Web3 marketplaces overall is like, you know, this centralization versus decentralization theme. And so like there's a tension between being an aggregator, which is one of the primary roles of a marketplace, right? You're aggregating demand and supply and, and you know, versus, like, you know, the spirit of Web3 being around decentralization. I think there's a, a couple of different ways this can manifest with marketplaces and what you're working on. One of them is actually having the embedded kind of marketplace place. You're actually building a platform to help other projects launch their own embedded marketplace. And I'll let you talk about maybe some of where that's happening already. But the other is how you think about kind of ownership of the community participants over Magic Eden. And I guess maybe without preempting the question Too much. How do you guys think about this tension here between demand aggregation and decentralization? And how do you intend to kind of build magic even for the long haul on that vector?

I can kick off and then, yeah, feel free to jump in. So I think look, as in our core DNA, we do believe in the winners in web 3 will not look like the winners in web 2. And we want to lean into that. We want to lean into new emerging behavior rather than take like a lot of the analogies from Web2 and copy and paste in here. But of course, we come from this strong consumer product, this kind of background where ultimately users want polished experiences where they're getting a lot of deep value from the product. That doesn't change whether it's in Web three or Web two. So you got to build things that's helpful for people and you got to build things that's easy to use for people. Those tenants are both important, but they're not necessarily mutually exclusive. So when we think about web3 over web2 as maybe one of these core DNA tenets we have, we believe in, let's say, community over centralization. We believe in composability and partnerships over build it yourself. And that already manifests in the way that we think about building the product. One of the things that we released earlier, maybe a couple of weeks ago, was our approach to trust and safety and listings. Because when you talk about centralization, that is one of the most, the biggest spikes where centralization becomes a discussion point because we control listing decisions and we are seen as central arbiters of what is worthy of a listing and what's not. Our approach is to use this community oriented rather than centralized philosophy, even though today we are centralized. And we are centralized because we want to ensure there is a layer of trust, safety, authenticity of the works on our platform. And today because of scaling up, everything's on fire. We have to do that in a central process. But the philosophy of how we want to put that into the future is open listings, but open listings in a way that where we still give different signals to our users to say, hey, not all listings, even if they are open and anyone can list, not all listings are created equal. We will help users differentiate what is a quality listing and what is a default open listing and what is max level quality listing. And we can give people different types of badges along the way based on kind of objective criteria. Another manifestation of this is one of the signals to quality is around whether the creator has been doxxed or not. Whether the creator has KYC themselves so that they're willing to represent their true self to the community. We don't believe in building those KYC or doxing processes ourselves because that would again be another point of centralization. And instead we have partnered with Civic, which is another ecosystem partner, to ensure their product is integrated and we surface those signals to our users. So I guess crystallizing all this. We do believe in community first, empowering users or empowering the community with the right information so they can make decisions. But at the same time, we know that, hey, users want polish, users want to trade in a trusted and safe kind of platform. Users want quality signals and we want to provide a product experience that still gives that to them. And we don't necessarily believe those two things are strictly mutually exclusive.

Yeah, I mean, the only other thing I'd add is similar to the point earlier around, Magic Eden as a first party app is one thing, but really what it is is it's kind of just like a liquidity protocol at the end of the day. Right. And that liquidity can be shared and utilized in a bunch of different places. An example of this which we'll get into is like In Game Marketplace that lists a bunch of items that all the items that are listed in an In Game marketplace are also listed on a Magic in a Magic in first party app. So that's an example of like, yeah, it doesn't all live centrally in one place ultimately, like where that liquidity sits. It's actually in a liquidity protocol which is Magic Eden. It just so happens that most people access today through the first party app, but we're actually seeing more and more examples where this is not the case. And we're actually very happy about this. Right. It's like the Exodus integration, it's like will be building the in game marketplace for many nations, which is one of the biggest games on Solana. Collections have their own marketplaces too, which we've helped them white label. So there's all these different sort of ecosystem partners that will end up using Magic Eden in different ways. And then as an end user, look, you should just access the item however way you want to. And whether that's on Magic Eden's first party app, but we'll build certain beautiful experiences. Or it's just directly in a game. I'm in an FPS and I'm shooting someone. I need to get a better weapon. I need to do it right there. And that makes total sense too. So all of that should be all within this world of liquidity that hopefully we'd love to contribute to the ecosystem.

Yeah, the embedded marketplace vision really makes sense to me for games where I can imagine, especially in a simulation game where you're playing or a role playing game, you just walk to your merchant store and then just buy the assets or the shields that you need right there without leaving the ecosystem of your game. It totally makes sense to me. And I have two fighters for Mini nations, so I'm very excited about that game. It's a really fun one to watch and I found out about it through Magic Eden. So everyone, if you're listening, subscribe to their launch updates because you can get some intel on exciting new projects coming out. But yeah, I would actually love to chat a little bit more about that topic, gaming in general. So why? You know, I think there's a lot of interesting things that you guys are building around gaming, you know, embedded marketplaces or you definitely seems like there's a specific focus. Could you talk a little bit more about why it makes sense to just focus on a vertical in general and maybe are there other verticals that you're interested in or you know, are there unique challenges or opportunities within gaming in particular that makes sense for that to be such a core focus for you guys?

I can kick off. Yeah. So I think like, the reason I think gaming is interesting is like if you think about NFTs in general, it's like this. The reason it's becoming popular, has become popular is because it's very social, it's very community oriented and like if you think about categories, games have always been extremely category community driven and extremely social. Right. That's true today. Take out crypto entirely. That's just true of games. And when you layer on kind of crypto elements to it, yeah, obviously it starts to make a ton of sense. So there's basically broadly three ways that we're really excited to work with games on. And actually this is one of the reasons that we were very intentional about building on a place like Solana. It's because we were really excited by the pipeline of games that were coming through and we're really close with the Solana foundation and we talk to them regularly about sort of like what are the best and coolest games that are coming through. So there's three things. Number one is we help these games launch their collections, their items, whatever it is that they're trying to do with NFTs. I'll use mini nations as an example because we've been talking about it, but for them it's like they have in game characters which you can immediately use in the game. They'll be dropping weapons, they'll be dropping shields, they'll be dropping all kinds of things, skins. All of that is imagine it's sort of all the stuff that you would expect that a Fortnite or a PUBG would have. But all of this stuff is true ownership because it's actually yours and in your own wallet. So that's the first thing. It's helping games drop their collections and items. The second thing is powering their in game marketplaces because users shouldn't need to leave the end to end gaming experience in order to transact and do the things that they need to do to be successful in their game. So part of this is we will then offer a set of APIs, allow games to integrate and use the underlying marketplace functionality that we've built and allows them to just focus on what they're really good at, which is like building a really, really fun game. And then for us, like we handle all the boring stuff like RPC nodes and like infrastructure and like all of that stuff, right? All the contract calls, we can just handle all of that. It's stuff we were our first party app is already using. And then the third thing, which we're pretty excited about, is like, to Jack's earlier point about like creating immersive experiences, it's like you want to land on a marketplace and, and we have pretty large distribution now just because so many people are coming into the app to buy and sell NFTs. But part of this is like, hey, how do you make this really fun and exciting and feel the real value? And what we started to do is actually just embed games directly into Magic Eden. So when you land on Mini nations today, the collection page, you'll see a button that says play now. And that button is right next to the collection items. So it's like I get there, I'm like, well, this Viking looks really cool. I can buy the Viking, hit a tab and I'm in the game with playing as my Viking. So that sort of stuff, it's like, it seems really naive.

My typical user journey is I go and play the game. I realize I suck. I'm like getting killed 30 times in a row. And I'm like, dude, I level up legendary battle axe in AK47 right now. So.

It'S true. It's true. Alex, if you're listening, Alex is the founder of Mini Nations.

He needs to like Nerf.

He needs to like let us play against level three. He's not level 40s. He's getting crushed.

There needs to be some better player matches.

No, but like, I think the point there is that it's like, yeah, it's fun, it's immersive and like you can feel what it means to like use NFTs right away. It's not just like, I'm buying an abstract profile picture. Like that can be fun too in many ways because it's a community thing. But this is tangible. It's like, whoa, I can actually get better at this game now.

Because you feel the value.

Well, I think that this instant gratification, instant utility, low cost of transaction, all these things actually bode very well for Solana as well, obviously. And I think you guys are sitting at a really interesting position to just have a purview over a lot of the projects that are at bay. Basically all the projects that are happening on Solana and kind of how that ecosystem is forming. It's all been relatively recent. It feels like NFTs on Solana are kind of having their moment over the last few months now. What do you think? Maybe you could comment on the state of affairs there? I think there was a point in time several months ago when it was kind of like a lot of the copycat projects and now it's kind of like the communities forming around some of these are super engaged, healthy. It just seems like there's a lot of interesting stuff happening. And so how do you think the evolution of NFTs on Solana will mirror or diverge? Kind of what's been happening on Ethereum and maybe you have some comments on kind of like what this multi chain world looks like in the future.

Yeah, I'll kick off on that one. I think one we're super bullish on Solana where we were very intentional with our choice to pick this chain. I think like there's no like simple answer like or like no simple assessment here. Right. Like in some ways I think some parts of the Solana ecosystem is still like drawing analogies of like what's happening from ETH and like you know, they bring over like techniques that they see networks in other aspects. Eth we're actually seeing some things where like ETH creators maybe are seeing, oh like Solana has because of its fast throughput, low transaction fees, allows them to create some new innovations or bring their ideas to life in a way that it wasn't as restrictive on ETH and they're coming over. So there's definitely a few big name kind of like ETH creators that's coming over as well. And I think the third bucket would be. Maybe Solana just in and of itself will have some really native behavior that will just completely emerge in and of itself. And one of the areas that we're super interested in is like dao formation, basically where NFT is super social. It's about bantering, right? It's like discord, people flaming each other and talking shop and stuff. And when you go into ETH daos, you create something on Aragon, it's like pretty serious stuff, right? People are voting on how to use the money. And that's probably because it just costs quite a lot of money to actually have something voted on chain. Whereas we think that, hey, maybe there's. Because of the super cost efficient properties of Solana, there is. People are talking about engaging daos in much more social, much more casual kind of ways. And that actually mimics really well with some of the community behavior that we see in NFTs. But overall, super bullish, I think.

Yeah, I think definitely there was. This happens with most chains, right? I think there's early adopters and it goes through sort of a phase where it's really easy to just rip what's been done previously. And then you get to a phase where it's like people start to realize like, oh shit, this community is pretty fun. It's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. And I think we're at that point now. A lot of people feel that way. And you talk to a lot of the og, sort of like people who own and I'll name some collections here. People may or may not be familiar with them, but it's like you talk to the OG sort of Thugbirds or Salon and Monkey Business and these sorts of collections. Now, that seemed kind of really basic and not that interesting at the beginning, but it's not even about the collection anymore. It's about these daos have become pretty fun, exciting, dynamic places where people are discussing cool ideas. The Thugbirds now have like a total big incubator program for like artists to come and drop their art using the Thugbirds community as a lever to drop those collections, right? And like, these are organic things that are happening. And we're excited because like the meta point is that, you know, the cost of experimentation on somewhere like ETH is really high. And if the cost is high, you're just less willing to do it, right? Whereas on Solana, if the cost of experimentation is low, people are just more willing to try. And that can manifest in many different ways. It can Manifest in, like, I'm willing to drop a collection. It can manifest in, like, I'm willing to create social daos. Yeah, I mean, we don't even know basically is like, kind of the point. And I think that's okay. Like, we'll acknowledge that, but like, we're just really excited by that and we'll go where the creators go. It's kind of like the fundamental thing here. And we're pretty excited we've passed the point now where Solana is like, what are people doing there? It's now like, oh, cool, there's some cool stuff happening and it's here to stay. Yeah.

The cost of experimentation point is a really good one. If you look at parallels between what gave rise to a lot of the big kind of Web two consumer Internet plays, it was the advent of modern experimentation frameworks and growth teams and such to really reduce the cost of kind of, kind of asking and answering questions. I think there are actually parallels to like, how some of these communities are forming. And yeah, I think that's a really, It's a really good, good insight and way of framing. I'm cognizant that we're like running up against time here. And so, I don't know, maybe we could hop to like a lightning round of a few final questions. I think one of the things I want to make sure we hit before that though was like, you know, you all are architected in a way where you can start to become very mobile native and mobile first. And I think it's really interesting that if you look at where we are with Web3, a lot of activity is still kind of happening on desktop. And yet those of us who have gotten a chance to experience with Phantom's Wallet, and we just had Rainbow on the pod, you could kind of start to see glimmers of kind of what a mobile native, like Web3World could look like. What is your point of view on that? And maybe you could comment on what's coming up with Magic Eden on the mobile side.

So we want to lean super hard into mobile and we want to be mobile first. Probably majority of our volume and activity and user base should be on mobile. I think it just makes sense a lot from a user perspective where users, their time and attention and activity is already on mobile. Right. And then NFTs is you shouldn't have to pull out your laptop to do some trading, join a mint. Right. You should be able to do it on the. Go on the bus, on the train and engage. And then I think mobile and NFTs just have some really, really nice synergies. You can think about NFTs as a ticket or your virtual identity or your offline identity. And we experienced that actually at Solana Breakpoint where there were so many events hosted by like our collection partners and you had to hold the NFT to join. But then in order to go to the event, I had to like, you know, we had to go like get a ticket from Eventbrite, like then upload some like, you know, our own wallet address for verification. But really it should be like a mobile app that, you know, you show at the door.

Right.

So there are some really nice synergies in the behavior there and that could be unlocked. So, you know, we want to lean into mobile. And yeah, we have an Android, like private beta right now and iOS is coming soon. So, you know, super, super psyched about that.

Yeah. And like, I don't know, I feel like from my standpoint, it's. You want to be able to do all the stuff on the go and in, in the. In a way that you already just consume all your other kind of apps. Right. And like, minting on mobile is something we're really excited about. Cause like, there's this amazing rush and excitement when these things happen. And you shouldn't need to like pull out your laptop and like connect a browser wallet. Such a weird behavior.

Yeah.

So, yeah, super excited about that and all of the native functionality on Magic Eden's web app today, like on mobile.

So, yeah, yeah. I have had probably one or two experiences where like you set your alarm for like 5am because the Mint is happening at a certain time and I'm there in my, like, with my laptop in bed. I'm like, there has to be a better way. So phones will make that possible.

And like, a lot of this stuff is so social. Right. And like on your phone you have access to like contact book, like different other like communication apps and stuff. You know, how many times have you like joined a Mint? And then you're like talking to your friend on this chat app on the side. You're going, did you get it or did you not get it? Like, there's like disappointment. I'm usually disappointed because my, like, I have butterfingers. I kind of like to capture fast and then someone else on our team will like get five. Right. And that kind of experience, you know, you can feasibly really think about mobile. So.

Yeah.

Or get one for me. Like that kind of behavior, which you could do with your friends. Yeah. Mike and I have back Channels all the time about projects that we're buying into, so can totally relate.

Nice.

That's awesome guys. Well, so last round, we'll just do a quick lightning round to wrap it up. These are a little bit of fun questions that we love to ask everyone who comes on. So the first one real quick quick is how or when did you guys get into crypto? Maybe when just to keep it quick.

2017. Yeah, I joined DYDX. That was my entry point extreme. I went like, I was of the opinion of like let's go real deep, real fast rather than like, you know, start reading, jump in on the deep end.

Yeah, yeah, I think I was dabbling like in, in 2017 like just buying tokens and stuff but like more full time stuff. 2021. Yeah. Worked at FTX and then did magic eat it maybe.

One piece of advice, the number one piece of advice you have for new founders kind of starting to build on Web three right now.

The opportunity is endless and like execution, speed and experimentation is by far the most important thing. I mean we're obviously astounded by how quickly Magic Eden has grown but like behind all of that is a sort of DNA that like velocity and I think that's something that you know, in the early days of building in Defi, at least from my experience is like people were building protocols and the cycles were long. But now a lot of the infra underlying is pretty, is pretty good and you can start building quickly and you can start sort of taking the same principles around building and shipping fast and yeah, I would say that's by far the most important thing.

Yeah, I was going to say exactly the same thing. Yeah, like time is of the essence. Yeah. Like don't overthink it. There's no grand strategy of the crypto universe. Just start shipping and then see what happens.

Yeah, yeah.

All right, you heard it here first start now is the advice. Time is of the essence. I love it. Last project or last question of lightning round is what's your latest purchased favorite nft. We named a few names names on in this conversation but anyone, anything else you'd like to call out?

So like the latest one I bought was a. Is a friendly frog social club the reason I bought it. So like we, you know Andy who is the founder of that collection, she's actually on our marketing team. She started this collection a while back before she joined Magic Eden. But the whole goal is just like it's meant to be a. Just a fun, supportive place to hang out.

Not.

No, not like trading shop talk any of that stuff. It's just like a fun community, let's just be friends kind of thing. So I love that. I love them. And then, yeah, my all time favorite, the team. The team gives me a lot of, you know, sponsored.

Sponsored post.

It's not a sponsored post.

Sponsored post. Coming up.

I love the Thugbirds. I'm a big Thug fan. You'll see me rocking my thug stuff all the time. Yeah. Team gives me a hard time for it. Yeah.

No, I think I'm just salty because I obviously like another collection. I get no love from that collection at all. Yeah. My latest was Soul Sisters. It was like we're doing a Christmas wrap, like a Secret Santa kind of thing, but with NFTs. And I gave a soul sister to one of our team members who's been amazing and it's a similar vibe, like very wholesome. And the soul sister was. It was a lady and had like rainbows and stuff in the background because this particular team member is like super cheery. Always brings this really sunny vibe to the team. But then the actual like the main character is this girl with like grills and she's like, give me a smirk because she's like, she's such a badass. She gets shit done within our company. So wanted to give that one to.

We got to see those. We'll put a links to them in the show notes. Thank you guys so much again for the time. This has been an amazing chat. Hope everyone that's listening enjoyed it as well. And until then, we'll see you next time.

Thanks guys.

Thanks so much, guys.