Gm frens,

Over the last 2 years, NFTs have seemingly come out of nowhere to become a cultural phenomenon unlike anything that has come before it.

Today, with celebrities such as Neymar, Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Reese Witherspoon, Justin Bieber all getting in on the action — it’s clear that NFTs have found favor with some of the top influences on the internet.

To date, the far majority of the most successful NFT projects have been built on the Ethereum blockchain, however, competition has been heating up with many developers now choosing to build their NFT collections on Solana.

In today’s edition of The Ground Floor we will be breaking down one of the biggest benefactors of this recent uptick in the demand for Solana NFTs — Magic Eden, the leading Solana NFT marketplace.

Can Solana NFTs Succeed?

Breaking down the growing success story of Solana NFTs & Magic Eden...

OpenSea was founded in December 2017.

It took OpenSea a grand total of 232 weeks & 2 days before they added support for Solana NFTs on their platform in April 2022.

From OpenSea’s standpoint they were struggling to deal with the existing demand for Ethereum NFTs on their platform, however, while OpenSea prioritized elsewhere — several other marketplaces were being built to service this growing demand.

Building Magic Eden

One such marketplace is Magic Eden.

Founded by 3 Australian founders, Jack Lu (CEO), Sidney Zhang (CTO), Zhuoxun Yin (COO) & Zhuojie Zhou (Chief Engineer) Magic Eden is by far the leading marketplace for Solana NFTs.

Today, they process over 90% of the total Solana NFT transaction volume.

To highlight just how far ahead Magic Eden is when it comes to Solana NFTs, in the last 30 days Magic Eden has facilitated over 1,800,00 Solana NFT transactions while OpenSea has facilitated less than 21,000 Solana NFT transactions.

Today, the average Magic Eden user transacts 8.4 times per day on the secondary market — no doubt in large part due to the lower fees on the Solana.

More Than 90% Market Share

Magic Eden was by no means the first movers to make a marketplace to support Solana NFTs, however, this clearly hasn’t stood in their way.

How exactly have they obtained more than 90% market share?

In the words of the companies Co-founder and CEO Jack Lu — they have been able to command such significant market share by heavily focusing on their community:

Community & Creators

What does it mean to Magic Eden to focus on community?

For Magic Eden, it meant working directly with NFT creators to provide their community with exclusive access to exciting NFT drops that came with the Magic Eden stamp of approval.

In turn, for projects to receive the Magic Eden stamp of approval they require the creators of these projects to reveal their IRL identities, provide clear product roadmaps with legally binding contracts to ensure communities aren’t rugged.

To date, Magic Eden has supported the launch of over 250 projects through their program that’s fittingly named Launchpad — with the company accepting less than 3% of the projects that apply to participate in this exclusive program.

Supporting Solana NFTs

While this strategy has been a core pillar of the company's success — Magic Eden also supports an additional 7,000 Solana NFTs on their platform.

Within these 7,000 Solana NFTs Magic Eden supports, in game assets have quickly become a core focus for Magic Eden.

Similarly, Fractal — a recently formed startup founded by the Co-founder of Twitch Justin Kan alongside the founder of Google Drive David Wurtz and others is also focusing on building a platform to service this exact same need.

Undoubtedly, such an inflow of talent from Web2 to Web3 is a very bullish sign for Solana NFTs with some of the very best builders in the Web2 World spending their time building the solutions required to bring Solana NFTs to the masses.

Bullish or Bearish?

Can Solana NFTs succeed long term? Absolutely.

There’s a growing consensus that blockchain based games will bring about the next NFT bull market, and should this prediction come to pass — it’s hard to envision a world whereby a meaningful percentage of these games aren’t built on Solana.

Yes, Solana is a vastly more centralized network than Ethereum and has run into ‘downtime’ issues, however, there’s no denying that the lower fees associated with using this chain will entice many creators to build on Solana vs on Ethereum.

Looking Forward…

Such creator adoption of Solana by no means guarantees that the next breakout success story in NFTs will be a project built on Solana, however, it certainty suggests that long term — Solana based NFTs stand a great chance at succeeding.

For Magic Eden who have already made a big bet on the success of Solana NFTs, it looks increasingly likely that they will continue to be one of biggest benefactors of this incoming wave of blockchain based games, alongside all future Solana NFTs.

3 Things You Need to Know

1) The NBA Launches its own Metaverse

Now, it remains to be seen whether this upcoming launch by the NBA is to feature any crypto native things — but it’s interesting to see nonetheless that huge brands are going for digitally native offerings when it comes to engaging fans or customers.

2) OpenSea Email-gate

An employee at one of OpenSea’s email vendors, Customer.io, decided to use their employee access to download and share email addresses of their customers.

Yet again, people in crypto are targeted.

It’s not a great look for a company who have been the subject of multiple phishing attempts in the past — but there’s more sympathy here as it is a vendor side issue.

Here’s to hoping none of the emails are misused.

3) GTA VI to be Play-2-Earn?

Some leaks have suggested that GTA VI (grand theft auto) will have a play to earn element in it.

Imagine purchasing a Ferrari NFT in game only to be blown up by your friend’s rocket launcher! 😂

We don’t know just how solid these rumors are, but there’s no doubt going to be some mainstream game studios and titles who incorporate some element of crypto into games — even if it’s just cosmetic NFTs.

Tweet of the week

An awesome thread by Jack Appleby about the success Stephen Curry, Under Armour and team had in launching his own brand NFTs.

Most brands and athletes launching NFTs candidly suck at the moment.

Here’s how they did it successfully… 👇

Thanks for the read,

See you next time! — OB1, Pet & Corwin.

This newsletter is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial or business advice to any person or entity.