Opinion
Liu in May 2022: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried is an absolute monster
“Well, I used to work at FTX. I think the founder there, Sam Bakeman Freed is a, is an absolute monster.”
Assertion Supported
Liu: Magic Eden became world's second-largest NFT marketplace in seven months
“We started magic Eden seven months ago in that time we've become the second largest NFT marketplace in the world.”
Assertion Partly supported
Liu: Magic Eden Reached $1B Cumulative GMV in 4–5 Months
“And we're the fastest marketplace to reach cumulatively a billion dollars in GMB traded. So we did that in around four or five months.”
Prediction Didn’t hold up
Liu: Magic Eden on track for $400M–$500M NFT volume this month
“So this month we're about to trade around four, five, four to five hundred million dollars of NFTs. On a marketplace.”
Insight
Liu: NFT marketplaces combine exchange economics with consumer marketplace software
“And if you step back and think about it, an NFT marketplace, the business model is really like a crypto exchange, right? But the features, the software that you build looks really like a consumer marketplace.”
Disclosure
Liu: Magic Eden split equity equally among its four founders
“No, it's a, it's an equity thing. Pretty vanilla, but yeah, like equal split, you know, I think.”
Assertion Supported
Liu: Magic Eden commands 90% to 95% of Solana NFT volume
“We've been consistently around 90 to 95% market share of the Solana blockchain of all NFTs traded on Solana for the past two, three months or so.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Liu: Magic Eden generated $8M in revenue in April 2022
“Made eight million dollars. Yeah.”
Insight
Liu: NFT market growth comes from creators' use cases, not underlying blockchains
“Growth doesn't necessarily start with the chain, right? It's the creators who create use cases for NFTs, and those use cases pull in new users. Chain is just a technology, just like an operating system on which it lives.”
Disclosure
Liu: Magic Eden plans to invest deeply in Web3 game developers
“The category that we're super bullish on going forward and we want to invest deeply in this gaming, right? In-game assets, in-game purchases, that's been a tried and tested business model for a decade for the gaming industry and users that are very tech savvy …”
Insight
Liu: Profile picture NFTs act as digital status symbols like Rolexes
“And in a way it's your internet version of, I don't know, like a Rolex or something or like a Nike bag. It's your personal branding on the internet.”
Opinion
Liu: Many NFT projects cut corners with paid influencer marketing
“There's a lot of NFT projects, which try to you know, cut a lot of corners, right? Basically they'll pay a bunch of influencers, get some juice up some marketing, but there is no real organic interest from the community in the collection.”
Disclosure
Liu: Magic Eden will philosophically never merge with another company
“I think philosophically we'll never merge.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: Magic Eden Built and Launched Website in 14 Days
“We launched a site in 14 days actually.”
Disclosure
Liu: Magic Eden Generates 70% to 80% of Revenue From Secondaries
“Launchpad is a little more spiky. I would say it's around 20, 80, so, or 30, 70. So 20% launchpad, 80% secondaries, or sometimes it goes up to 30, 70.”
Disclosure
Solana Foundation invested in Magic Eden's Series A round
“Solana Foundation, we've been in contact with from day one effectively. You know, very, ah, you know, very privileged for them to have been out as an investor in our Series A as well.”
Disclosure
Magic Eden charges a 2% marketplace take rate on GMV
“Right now we click two percent of the transaction volume.”
Disclosure
Magic Eden raised a $2.5M seed round in October 2021
“October last year, two and a half mil seed round.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: OK Bears succeeded through six months of grassroots community building
“And what the okay best team did extraordinarily well was they did a lot of super organic grassroots community building to build interest in their project over six months.”
Assertion Supported
Liu: Magic Eden averages around 30,000 unique daily active traders
“In general, we see around 30,000 unique traders every day.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Liu: One-third of Magic Eden's business team are former NFT creators
“So on the business side, we're proud to say around a third of our team former NFT artists or former NFT collection creators”
Assertion Supported
Liu: Magic Eden Hosts Almost 10,000 NFT Collections
“We've got like almost 10,000 collections.”
