Magic Eden Will Pay You to Buy and Sell Solana NFTs

Multi-chain NFT marketplace Magic Eden is putting more focus on its original home on Solana, and today the firm announced a “Chapter II” initiative that will see Magic Eden further open its platform in various ways—and even give traders free SOL for buying and selling NFTs.

Magic Eden has started aggregating listings from competing marketplaces, giving traders a single destination to manage listings across platforms and see prices and listings across the entire Solana NFT market. The startup—which was valued at $1.6 billion as of June 2022—said that it will also open-source its marketplace smart contract in the coming days.

Furthermore, the company will also remove a “co-sign” feature that prevented its own marketplace listings from being easily aggregated by other NFT marketplaces.

These moves address long-standing criticisms of Magic Eden, which has consistently been the leading Solana NFT marketplace since launching in late 2021. Rival platforms and other Solana builders have taken Magic Eden to task for using closed-source code and for limiting composability opportunities across platforms.

However, it’s still unclear whether Magic Eden will still use an escrow contract that takes custody of users’ listed NFTs—a leading critique of Magic Eden’s marketplace model that has previously been called out by rivals as a potential security threat. Decrypt asked a Magic Eden representative for clarification, but did not immediately hear back.

As part of the relaunch, Magic Eden will temporarily change its “maker fee” to -0.25% for certain types of transactions. In other words, Magic Eden will pay you to buy and sell NFTs.

If you list an NFT for 100 SOL, Magic Eden wrote as an example, then you’d ultimately get 100.25 SOL if it sells. Similarly, if you make a collection offer on a certain Solana NFT project and it’s fulfilled, then you’ll effectively get a 0.25% rebate on the purchase price. Users can also earn fees for operating automated market maker (AMM) NFT trading pools on Magic Eden.

Magic Eden’s moves come amid the rise of a surging rival called Tensor, which has taken a leading share of Solana NFT market share at certain points over the last few weeks. Tensor offers a rewards model akin to Blur, the leading Ethereum NFT marketplace.

Market data from Tiexo shows Magic Eden with a lead over the last week, with nearly 44% of trading volume compared to about 40% for Tensor. Over the past day, however, Magic Eden takes a heavier share at 51% of the Solana NFT market compared to about 35% for Tensor.

Amid the market shake-up, Tensor developers criticized Magic Eden for its co-sign requirement, renewing arguments that some rivals made last year when Magic Eden was dominant. Although Magic Eden expanded to other chains like Ethereum, Polygon, and Bitcoin over the past several months, the firm said recently that it would return its primary focus to Solana.