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- [00:00]
Z Yin
Foreign.
- [00:10]
Brendan
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of the Crypto 101 podcast. Man 2025. Starting off with some good old fashioned volatility, what we know and what we love, we're reminded here in the new year that prices don't only go up. Although for the past two months it felt that way in light of sort of this, this new regulatory regime that everybody's getting excited about, all these developments going on with AI, all these crypto protocols coming out with just new launch after new launch and it's really, it's really exciting to watch. But of course, volatility cuts both ways. So, Brendan, how are you doing from the other side of the country? Are you surviving? You're not getting too many, too many cuts on the, the futures trading floor, are you?
- [00:55]
Co-host 1
Not too many, but you're right, you know, we have seen a lot of volatility. And, you know, despite the volatility, despite us going up or down or sideways for any amount of time, the industry keeps on moving. And today we brought in, you know, perhaps one of the biggest builders from that bear market and man, they're, they're really reaping those rewards now. So excited to chat about it today, I'll let you introduce the one and only.
- [01:19]
Brendan
Oh, I get to do the honors. I love it. I'm very, very pleased to introduce Z Yin, who's the co founder and chief operating officer of Magic Eden. Z, welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast. How are you doing? Good.
- [01:32]
Z Yin
Thanks for having me, boys. It's good to be here. Excited to chat.
- [01:35]
Brendan
Yeah, you bet. Sweet. No, Magic Eden, it's. If it's not a household name yet, my. One of my big bets is that by the end of 2025, it will be. And I'm sure many of our listeners who have been trading crypto actively over the course of the past maybe, you know, six months to a couple years, have heard of Magic Eden. You guys were primarily, or I should say initially known for your, your incredible trading tools around NFTs. But that is like now just almost, you know, call it a footnote on the, the long list of what Magic Eden does and who they are. So you're the co founder. We want to go back. Okay. We like to take time machines here at Crypto101. We want to go back to the start, not just of Magic Eden, but the start of, you know, you right, as a, as an influencer, as a builder, as a creator in the crypto space. What pulled you in to this industry? What's kind of that impact that you wanted to have. And then how did that dovetail into, hey, we're gonna found magic, Eden, me and my buddies and the rest is history. So let's, let's go back to the start.
- [02:38]
Z Yin
All right, yeah, happy to, happy to. And yeah, appreciate again, appreciate the time. It's, it's always good to. It's always good to have a catch up on these things so I can go back a little bit. I mean, I came into crypto in 2017. I mean, I feel like you have to go in. It's like pick one of the cycles where most people enter, right? For me, that was the 2017 cycle. And at the time, honestly, I spent a bunch of years, probably from 2015 to 2017 thinking about just being on the sidelines, like being an average. Just like I bought crypto and Coinbase kind of thing. I had a friend who was, who was at Coinbase at the time and he said to me, hey, you have to take this crypto thing seriously. It's going to be the future. There's so many interesting things happening. I kind of faded him for a couple of years to my detriment. To my detriment in 2015, 2017. So in 2017, when everything went crazy, I was like, okay, yeah, it's like impossible not to pay attention to this. So I at the time was working in healthcare, which was not my expertise previously. It's more like I was at a startup and I knew I just really wanted to work on early stage stuff. So my background previously I studied economics and I worked in consulting. So I was at Bain & Co. Doing a whole bunch of random projects.
- [03:58]
Brendan
Nice.
- [03:59]
Z Yin
I'm from Australia, so I was in the mines. I actually worked in a uranium mine for like nine months, which is, yeah, a whole crazy set of stories. And so when I came into sort of startups and tech, I was obviously looking for something that was just pretty frontier, right? And I went into healthcare and pretty quickly, pretty early on, I was like, oh man, there's very little that I can change in this industry. And it's just so antiquated that everything's very entrenched. So fast forward a couple of years late 2017, through a mutual friend, I actually got to meet a bunch of the really early builders in. I guess back then it wasn't even called Defi. It was just like a bunch of people in San Francisco that were working on protocols. So these were like 0x maker set, protocol, compound, that whole first generation of Defi for sure. And I met through mutual friends. Synthetics.
- [05:02]
Brendan
Right, because those are the Australian guys too, right down there.
- [05:05]
Z Yin
Yeah, that's right, that's right. So I've met basically the founder of dydx, Antonio. And at the time I was like, yo, this seems interesting, but wow, this is like pretty, pretty out there because none of this really existed. You couldn't do anything on Ethereum really at that point apart from buy some random ICOs. So for me I was kind of just like, okay, do I believe that as an industry this is going to be a huge wave over the next 10 years that I want to actually commit 10 years of my career doing this thing? To me that answer was a clear yes. Just because I really believed in obviously what Bitcoin was and still is today. But at the time it was kind of like Ethereum was the first smart contract platform. So I thought that was very interesting and novel. I was like, okay, that as a technology could be really interesting because you can build stuff on it and then who knows what that could become? But I think I want to be a part of that. So at that point then it was more just then how can I find a team that is at least very long term driven?
- [06:08]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [06:08]
Z Yin
They're not just looking for a quick buck. And I thought that early group of just like early defi people was exactly that.
- [06:14]
Co-host 2
Right?
- [06:17]
Z Yin
They were definitely very idealistic.
- [06:19]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [06:20]
Z Yin
And you kind of need a bit of that at the beginning because otherwise you're climbing uphill. So anyway, I joined dydx. I spent almost three years there. We built out a whole bunch of. I think we were the first ones to build out margin trading on chain, lending on chain, and then perpetuals trading on chain. And it's amazing to have been around and had the opportunity to see sort of that, that first wave of Defi just go from basically nothing to defi summer in 2020, right. Which we, all of us remember the vegetable and fruit farming and all of whatever else that was happening. But so much work went into that just to build a lot of the underlying infra in the two years before. And then. So that was my first sort of three years in crypto. And then at that point I wanted to basically get a little bit closer into like technical. Yeah, basically the technical side of crypto and also working with product. And I wanted to see crypto at a certain level of scale because at dydx we were serving, you know, it's like in the thousands of users, right? It's not in the, not in the hundreds of thousands of millions of users. So I had an opportunity to go to Coinbase and I ended up going to Coinbase for about a year and a half. I built out a bunch of the institutional trading products. So all the products that I think if you use Coinbase prime today, if anyone is familiar with that product, it's all the trading tools that they have. I spent a bunch of time building T wops, different trade execution methods, all the exchange routing, smart, smart order like algorithms, like all that kind of stuff. So as you can imagine, like I like trading, I like that stuff. So yeah, and then that took me to about 2021 and around that period I was thinking about, I mean there's just so much interesting things happening in crypto. So I wanted to basically get back into the trenches almost. And me and one of my co founders now, we were doing a whole bunch of trading and just general degenerating across NFTs and tokens in 2021. And I can tell the story about how we started things, but that eventually snowballed into us experimenting with a few different things. And then we had this thesis about NFTs being basically a really big consumer moment for crypto and we decided to kind of jump in like mid to late 2021, September of 21. And yeah, and the rest is, the rest is history. I feel like I've seen just like all the so many different facets of crypto. Now it's like defi institutions and now like NFTs and on chain trading I've kind of done the tour of duty in some sense.
- [09:16]
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- [10:10]
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- [11:11]
Brendan
Well then you're certainly the guy to be building Magic Eden. Because the way I kind of think of Magic Eden, and you know, this is just from an outsider's perspective and I'm glad to have you on so that you could kind of, you know, say what it is definitively in your own words. But I view it as the one stop shop for crypto and defi activity. So whether you want to, you know, invest in crypto tokens and trade them with one another if you want to, you know, send money back and forth to friends. If you want to collect NFTs, I mean, you could pretty much do it all on Magic Eden. And I'm curious, how do you think of like, what you are? Are you the One Stop Shop? Do you want to be, you know, a direct competitor to some other, you know, similar protocol? Like, how do you, how do you define yourself?
- [11:53]
Z Yin
Yeah, that's a really good question. I think One Stop Shop is a really apt way to put it. I've also heard people in our community, it's funny, we often get People in the community basically trying to come up with monikers of how to describe Magic Eden. Now that we are doing a lot more than NFTs and the ones that I've heard is kind of like Amazon on Chain. Amazon is something that I've heard which I quite like. I've also heard on Chain Binance which I also quite like. These are not things we would. Yeah, we will not describe ourselves as that as a marketing thing because I think you want to obviously associate, you want to build your own brand, right, not rely on someone else. But I think those are pretty utilitarian ways to describe actually what we are building. So I think it's pretty reasonable and let me unpack that a little bit. So if I look at the Magic Eden's been around for three years now. We started in September of 21. If I unpack sort of the first, let's say two years of magic Eden we were very much building. It was like Solana NFTS was like the first thing we did. And then we went from Solana NFTS to Cross chain like multi chain NFTs. And that now has turned into a. We're on like 10ish. I think we're at 10 chains now for NFTs including obviously EVM soul. Bitcoin has been a very, very big area of our business which has done really well. And that's what I would call phase one of Magic Eden. And I think that's still a huge part of our business today and what probably most people know us for. And then in the last 12 months, the most recent year, we've started entering into a couple of other different things. And this is sort of the phase of what I would call multi category Magic Eden. It's no longer just like NFTs is like category number one. And then the two new things that have more recently come come into the product suite is number one, we have like a multi chain like Cross Chain Wallet which now has about over half a million monthly active users. And that's something we launched about nine months ago. So it's very, very new in the scheme of things. And then the second thing is we have a whole suite of products around token trading. So if you think about it and if you abstract away just all the stuff, just peel back the layers like what are we? I think what we are is actually it's kind of the one stop shop to trade anything on chain. The reason we even decided to do all these things, right, why did we not just say only do Solana NFTs as an example. And the reason why we believe in this thesis of allowing enough to trade anything on chain is the fact that if you look at the evolution of crypto as a market, let's go back to 2018, around when I first came into crypto. Number one, there weren't that many assets to trade. Of course there's all these ICOs, but I don't really count them as really long term things to trade. And most of that existed on centralized exchanges, right? Like the vast, vast, vast majority, like 99.9% of tokens and volume was on centralized exchanges. And there just wasn't that much creation happening on chain. You fast forward six years, seven years now since then, and it's basically flipped, it's actually flipped on its head where there's an enormous amount of creation that's happening on chain and that's in the form of NFTs, that's in the form of tokens. So all kinds of things being created. And the share of trading that happens on chain relative to centralized exchanges is also rapidly increasing. So our thesis is that long term that's going to take over and there needs to be one venue that makes it easy for users to come and trade anything. And the first generation of DAPPS was very much like I focus on one use case on one chain.
- [15:55]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [15:55]
Z Yin
It's like Uniswap token, like AMM on Ethereum or NFT Marketplace on Solana.
- [16:03]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [16:03]
Z Yin
I just think that world is, we are way past that world because assets are being created everywhere and users want to traverse the chains to just get to whatever is the content that is interesting, whether it's AI coins, meme coins, whatever, ordinals, runes, it doesn't matter.
- [16:21]
Co-host 1
Right.
- [16:21]
Z Yin
It's kind of just like whatever is interesting content. And then we want to just build the best experience to let users do that. And I have strong conviction, extreme conviction actually, that that's going to be an enormous market. So that's why I think we're doing what we're doing.
- [16:34]
Brendan
Wow, that's incredible.
- [16:36]
Co-host 1
Yeah, I mean it's fascinating. And Z, I think you have this unique perspective where you worked at Coinbase and you worked at dxdy and you have like a lot of the more traditional trading experience from there and that background and then transitioning into Magic Eden, which which you know, really started with NFTs and has since expanded into so much more. You have this, this background and this experience trading all sorts of different products to like you say, building out margin and perpetuals and contracts and you know, Even dealing with Coinbase, which is notorious for spot trading and, you know, now working with NFTs, you know, it really is fascinating. But I guess, you know, what are some of the metrics that stick out to you because you have this well rounded, you know, trading experience and background? You know, what do you like to look at when it comes to just trading in general? I mean, there's so many different metrics and what we see is that people tend to get a little bit drowned, but they want to enter into, into crypto trading or NFT trading, but they get a bit overwhelmed because they have to look at tokenomics and news and price charts and on chain activity and then maybe social activity. And there's so much to look at. But when it comes to the kind of stuff that you work at now with Magic Eden, you know, what are some of those, those key data points that you think are the most relevant or useful when it comes to trading overall?
- [18:01]
Z Yin
Yeah, it's a great question. That's a great question. We spent a lot of time thinking about this actually. And actually it was funny yesterday we had this internal meeting amongst our product team about what should we even put on our homepage? What are the signals and discovery type things that we want to put on the homepage? So I think this is actually an amazing, very, very relevant question. So I'll say that there's no hard and fast rule because it really depends on what it is that the user wants to trade. So I'll give you an example, right? It's like for Coinbase's app, you don't need to really put holders and signals like that because people are buying and selling Bitcoin, Ethereum, all the majors, right? So there are certain stats and things that don't really matter. But for trading on chain items, they are typically less liquid, they are newer tokens. It's more like there's a lot of liquidity signals, volume signals, price signals, as well as social signals, and then sentiment signals. I'd say all those things basically matter when you're trading on chain stuff. And the reason I say that is not to say that it's not important for bigger assets and assets that most of them on centralized exchanges. But you guys know when you follow crypto, Twitter and all the stuff that's happening on chain, everything moves at like a rapid speed, right? It's like a lightning speed. Something might be hot today. In three days, everyone's forgotten about it, right? So that's why I think surfacing some of those signals is really, really important. And one of the big goals for us is we have all this really interesting data around what people are doing on chain, what people are doing on our platform, how people are browsing. There's obviously a lot of social signals on Twitter and elsewhere. And I think that there are some really, really interesting ways to surface some of that into a discovery and discoverability surface. Like, for example, a homepage where you can start to at least point users in the direction of like, hey, this is some stuff that is getting a lot of attention, right? It's like, this isn't some stuff that you should take a look at, not to recommend, to buy or sell anything. It's more just like, hey, there is a lot of liquidity and a lot of attention flowing to, let's say, base AI coins created on virtuals, right? So that's the kind of thematics that I think are very important for us to surface. And what I think about when it comes to, like, what users want to see when it comes to trading and even personally, what I want to see when I.
- [20:54]
Brendan
When I trade, that's awesome. And I think that's exactly, you know, exactly right. And, you know, I could even imagine, you know, Magic Eden having some kind of its own AI bot that people could interact with or something like that. You know, I mean, everybody feel like everybody's launching an AI bot. I even saw the other day there was another podcast that launched their own AI bottom. It's going through listening to all the episodes and coming up with all sorts, you guys. Yeah, I was like, I gotta. I gotta do that. I gotta get into that. So maybe you'll see a Crypto101AI bot, a Magic Eden AI bot. But no, I mean, all this stuff is crazy. And like you said, you guys are. Are kind of at the nexus of it all. You know, what do they say? Selling picks at pickaxes to the miners? There's people that are coming for gold in the hills of crypto. And yeah, I mean, you guys are there at the center of everything. I'm curious. I mean, you guys have obviously an incredible amount of data that, I mean, it's. I don't know how much of it is like, proprietary or if it's like all on chain and all that kind of stuff. But, like, from the data that you guys maybe monitor, like, what are people doing the most on your platform? Are they minting NFTs? Are they trading runes? Are they trading and swapping, like, just fungible tokens like Ethereum for Uniswap tokens or what Are they doing the most on your platform?
- [22:13]
Z Yin
Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I'll give you guys kind of a broad snapshot and some stuff here is I think publicly available. Some stuff like maybe people won't know that is more like our data, which I'm happy to share anyway. Yeah, Alpha, basically. Alpha. So on the. So maybe I'll start with a couple of things that maybe are probably not. Yeah, it's probably more or less more obvious than I think stuff that people would expect. So a lot of our activity is of course minting and trading NFTs. And the kind of unique part of this that I'll call out is that it's. We see different activity that happens on different chains. So I'll give you guys an example. Base. Most of the activity on base is minting. It's actually predominantly minting and not trading.
- [23:13]
Brendan
Just like a bunch of random bots and random people just like making their own meme coins and making their own NFTs and stuff.
- [23:19]
Z Yin
Just minting all kinds of things. Yeah, like $1 here, $2 things you.
- [23:23]
Brendan
Don'T want to know.
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Co-host 1
Yeah, they can't be spoken.
- [23:27]
Z Yin
Unspeakable. No, it's not unspeakable. So that's like an example. And then on Bitcoin it's like very few transactions but it's very high value. So the average trade size there is like 1000 bucks or something. It's really high. Right, because people are, they want to pay for, they're happy to pay high fees to get something that's like quote unquote more rare. And then you see something like ApChain which doesn't do a ton of volume necessarily, but it does something like 15% of our users are actually using Ape chain every day. And that's really interesting because yeah, it is kind of just like people minting, people trading sort of lower value collections, people just having a bit of fun. Right. It's like nothing that serious, but it's a lot of users who are coming back to just have a bit of fun there. So that's like on the NFT side, the stuff that people may not know as much about is that we have a huge amount of activity in the Magic Eden mobile app. It's like the cross chain wallet where people are trading tokens, particularly cross chain swaps. So I'll give you guys an example. In December, there was about $200 million of volume in the Magic mobile app through just cross chain swaps. And the vast majority of that was people going to and from bitcoin sold and sold bitcoin.
- [25:07]
Brendan
Wow.
- [25:07]
Z Yin
Just going back and forth. Right. Because they either were rotating some of their meme coin profits back into bitcoin or maybe there was an ordinal mint they wanted to participate in. So they wanted to rotate some of that capital into ordinals or vice versa. They were taking some of their bitcoin to then go basically trade and see if they could get 100 extra on soul Meme coins. Right. So those flows are actually really interesting and it also enables a better experience on Magic Eden because you can then whichever area of crypto you want to go to, there's a way to get across.
- [25:46]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [25:46]
Z Yin
And do it very quickly and very easily. So that's the stuff that I think is quite promising and it's been growing at a rapid clip on our platform. Yeah.
- [25:54]
Co-host 1
And you know, you mentioned something that really stuck out to me when you were talking about the different kinds of NFTs out there. I mean, you talk about some of the legacy ones that are really high value and then you have some of these chains that are just really high volume NFT collections. And it got me thinking, you know, what do you think is better? These higher value NFTs that maybe have lower activity and a lower supply, like.
- [26:19]
Brendan
The crypto punks, the ether rocks.
- [26:21]
Co-host 1
Yeah. Maybe even apes. Or on the contrary, do you think that maybe something that is lower value, like a lower value NFT collection with maybe higher activity and a higher supply apply, is ultimately better?
- [26:35]
Z Yin
Yeah. Oh, that's a really tough one, I think.
- [26:39]
Brendan
Shades of gray. Shades of gray. That's my answer.
- [26:41]
Z Yin
Many, many shades. There's many shades. One thing I'll say on this one is if I'm thinking about. I'll answer this from a couple of perspectives. If I'm thinking about this as like, if I'm like a chain and I'm like, oh, I want to make sure my chain has like a really healthy NFT market. I want both. You need both, actually, because you kind of need the smaller lower value collections and you want a lot of experimentation and creation of those things just to get the market bootstrapped.
- [27:13]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [27:13]
Z Yin
Because no one is just immediately going to buy or ape into something like an eth rock.
- [27:21]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [27:22]
Z Yin
Just immediately. So you kind of need the long tail stuff to kind of get things going. But then you also want the really expensive stuff because eventually, like, it's almost like it's like verbal goods. Right. It's like social signals. You want, eventually people want to rotate their way up into the really high, high end valuable stuff. So I think you kind of need both on from like the magic eaten perspective, we honestly, we're agnostic in the sense of what we actually just care most about is that we want to create the best experience for people to be able to just access all of that content, no matter what it is. So you'll notice actually that we have some specific things that we build depending on what people are trying to do. So on Bitcoin, because transaction confirmation times are so long, because Bitcoin takes, I don't know, 20 minutes to mine each block, there's certain features we have to build in order to meet those needs. But some of that stuff does not matter at all. In Solana, right, Where people can just train really fast and they can just get to where they want to get to really quickly. And then from a user's perspective, I think that probably similar to the chain, where you want access to a very, very diverse set of collections and content. And so that's why I think probably the most important thing, the answer is you need both. But the most important thing from a sequencing perspective is that you really, really want just a lot of creation to happen. You want a lot of creation because once that creation gets going, then inevitably there will be some cheap stuff, medium stuff, expensive stuff that gets created and it gives life to the ecosystem.
- [29:11]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [29:11]
Z Yin
So I think that's probably the most important thing from a sequencing perspective. But you ultimately want both.
- [29:16]
Brendan
Yeah, and I totally agree. And, and they're totally different. Like right now I think there's a lot of value in, you know, these, you know, on chain ways to flex sort of your net worth or whatever. And you could have these really expensive NFTs. But there's also like really cool NFTs that could kind of give you the, the rights to royalties for a certain song. I've seen those and all sorts of different kinds of things. But I want to ask you kind of like how you see NFTs evolving next? You know, right now most of their reputation is like, they're pretty much like collectible JPEGs. Like there's negligible amounts of revenue streams going to NFT holders. What's kind of the, the next step? And maybe you could say like, you know, what are some of the innovative use cases that you've kind of seen so far?
- [30:05]
Z Yin
Yeah, I think right now, I mean, I'm glad, first of all that I think the regulatory environment is going to get clearer, Right? Totally. I think that means, I guess in general, not just for NFT creators, but people can just be A little more experimental about trying new mechanisms, new mechanics, whether it's NFTs or tokens. So that's the first thing I think the second thing is that I actually agree with you that NFTs are kind of trending towards more. It's more like either representations of a deeper representation of a community.
- [30:45]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [30:46]
Z Yin
And I still think NFTs are a much better use case for that than meme coins. Meme coins is kind of like I can get exposure to a certain ideology or community but the way people communicate and flex that they are part of something. I think the best way to do that is still with NFTs and I think that still held true even in the last kind of year and a bit where NFTs have been relatively more quiet than everything else in crypto. And then I think that collectibility and Effectively it's like NFTs as high status social signals. It's like owning something that's rare. I think that is actually extremely, extremely, that's held extremely well over the last couple of years and I expect that to continue. So the piece that I think where I have been a little more like it's probably evolved a little slower than I expected is basically straight up utility in NFTs.
- [31:50]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [31:51]
Z Yin
That hasn't really come to very much that much fruition I think as much as people thought in the last few years. Whether that's like some revenue thing which for obvious reasons there's some like regulatory complications around that. But even things like utility and like for like gaming NFTs or utility for like loyalty programs.
- [32:14]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [32:14]
Z Yin
Things like that. I do, I am excited for that. I still think there's a place for entities on those fronts. But I think like anything there's sort of, it takes a little bit, a little bit of you know, winding through and finding product market fit on some of those use cases as well as additional experimentation. But I'm, I have high conviction that that'll, that'll come, come through in the next couple of years.
- [32:43]
Co-host 1
Yeah, I mean it's, it's an exciting time when you look forward because there really is a lot of potential for, for all of this and even the industry as a whole and I know kind of you all have taken the next step in Magic Eden by launching the token. Last month, I believe it was on December 10th, the Magic Eden token launched. So I'm curious from your perspective, what is the role that that token is going to have in the ecosystem?
- [33:12]
Z Yin
Yeah, it was a busy December, that's for sure. I was hoping for a Chill end to the year.
- [33:22]
Brendan
But you'll never forget that Christmas, I'm sure.
- [33:25]
Z Yin
Yeah. So obviously really exciting for the ME Token to launch. The ME foundation did a huge effort to basically get that launched over the lots of work went into it. I think from our perspective, there's a few things that I'll just call out about why it was such a big moment, I think for the community in General. So number one, there was about like 125 million tokens that were dropped to users of the magic of an ecosystem. That's everyone from users in 2024 all the way back to users in 2021.
- [34:10]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [34:12]
Z Yin
So a lot of our OGs got rewarded with like a $700 million pie, which is really insane. So I'm really first of all just very grateful for our community and our users and also really happy to see them with a huge win.
- [34:31]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [34:31]
Z Yin
So that makes me really, really, really happy from what comes next and why is this important for the future of the ecosystem is that number one, Magic Eden is building a lot of things. And what this token really means is it's kind of a way for our community to number one, galvanize and really get behind. Like, hey, do you believe in what Magic Eden is building? If so, then this community is for you.
- [35:04]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [35:05]
Z Yin
And we've tried to really convey that message both beforehand and even going forward as well. And it's been amazing to see the number of people that are trying to get involved and are getting involved in helping grow the magic ecosystem. The second thing I'll say is that the token is a really amazing way to tie all the products and all the things that we are building together. And I'll give you an example, because now we are not just an entity marketplace, of course, but we are now like a multi category company. There's like a cross chain wallet and then there's token trading. So you can kind of do so many things now and you need one basically system and engagement layer to tie all of that together. And I think the ME token is a really, really great way to do that. And we want to effectively ensure that ME token holders and people that stake, yeah, they are a really big part of different ways to get rewarded and incentivized going forward to continue to contribute to the Magic Eaton ecosystem. So that's why I think it was such a big moment and then going forward it will continue to be a big thing. There's obviously a lot of things happening around staking and quests right now which are all available through the Magic Eden mobile app as well as on our website. And then also the big thing that's coming up is more like we have a season two coming out at the end of March. So we're like halfway through I guess the season now and yeah, it's been amazing. It's been a huge, huge sort of amazing to see basically the number of people that have come out and participated in a really active way since the token launch.
- [36:53]
Co-host 1
Yeah, I mean, speaking about rewarding users, has the team thought about the possibility of potentially profit sharing with the ME token?
- [37:02]
Z Yin
Yeah, I think on that one right now, in the near term, I don't think so. Not because it's not like a dogmatic thing against it. It's more that our philosophy of building Magic Eden just in general is that everything we do because the industry is so early and everything really is just still very early, everything should be reinvested to grow.
- [37:31]
Co-host 2
Right?
- [37:32]
Z Yin
Everything should basically go towards, we should build more, make the UX better, build more useful products. And over some time period maybe there are some ways to, token holders can vote to figure out some ways to basically turn on some more utility or things like that. But I don't think that at least from our perspective should be a core focus of the near term. The near term is just let's build a lot of things, make the ecosystem massive and everything else should take care of itself down the line. I also think that a big barrier is probably, there's been a lack of regulatory clarity. So I think that has to get sorted out and in time I think some of these ideas could come to fruition.
- [38:19]
Brendan
Yeah, no, I'm super optimistic that with right now our President elect, he's got his own DeFi platform, basically WorldFi Liberty.
- [38:33]
Z Yin
I've gotta believe that when you think.
- [38:36]
Brendan
About that, right, it's pretty wild. There's gotta be a future in which he just blows the doors open off of all this defi crypto stuff. And you know, everybody in America and you know, who, who hasn't been able to interact with certain aspects of the ecosystem will totally be able to. And I think, yeah, 2025, 2026, it's going to be really, really bright because you know, it's really hard to price in that new universe of participants. Like everybody's like oh well, ever since he got elected it, you know, it's up, you know, whatever double or 60%, whatever it is, you know, but then all the other little altcoins are up so much like okay, well it's already priced in. Well, maybe there was some element of pricing in this new regulatory regime. But like, once you actually have those new buyers coming in the market, you. I'm actually having a deja vu right now to this time last year. Literally this time last year when the ETFs launched and everybody was like, the ETF flows are priced in because bitcoin went from 25k to 65k at the, @ the time of the launch. And all the, the flows have been priced in. I remember there's a big argument. And then everybody's like, well, you can't price in like the actual passive flows coming from all these different funds going into bitcoin and crypto ETFs over time. And so the market corrected all throughout January and then pretty much didn't stop until, you know, mid March had a little bit of a correction and then continued up all throughout Q4. And this was mostly just like all of these passive ETF buyers buying like $1 billion a week practically or whatever it ended up being. But I don't even know where I was going with that tangent other than like, you know, a lot of, lot of exciting stuff going on and there's going to be. Yeah, oh yeah, the, the, the, the president with the Defi platform. Hard, hard to price, but I think it's going to be really bright future and magic. Eden's gonna, you know, definitely benefit from that. But before we let you go, I, I wanted to, to get your thoughts here just on like, you know, a lot of folks who listen to the podcast are crypto traders and crypto investors. And so like, if you kind of put on your, your investing hat, in your trading hat, what are just like some words of wisdom that we could kind of close out on for, for a lot of the folks who are like, following the markets, trying to get edge, trying to make, you know, profitable, you know, sort of ventures in their own portfolios. And of course, nothing we ever say is investment or trading advice, but just from somebody who's, who's made it, you know, like what, what are some of the, the key things? And you could go, you know, philosophy, you could go actual tools and resources, whatever you want, but feel, feel free to riff.
- [41:10]
Z Yin
Okay. Okay. And of course, yeah, nfa. Nfa, nfa. I definitely have not made it as a trader. I'll say that I'm just building some stuff that helps traders, I think. Okay. The first thing I would say is that pick your game. Like there's so many games you could play.
- [41:31]
Co-host 2
Right?
- [41:32]
Z Yin
Like the simplest game is. Okay, I just want to get some crypto exposure. Well then that game is more straightforward. It's just like, yeah, you should probably just buy the majors and just hang onto them for a long time. That's one game. The complete other side of the spectrum is I want to be completely in the trenches following the latest and greatest niche coins that are launching on Solana.
- [41:58]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [41:59]
Z Yin
That is like a completely different game. So I think depending on your. Yeah. Your time, your goals, just make sure the game is clear. Then I think the second thing is go deep on that thing.
- [42:17]
Co-host 2
Right.
- [42:17]
Z Yin
It's actually just from my perspective, I would say this is true. As an investor, a builder, a trader, for anyone, it's impossible to cover everything in crypto. Like I'm basically working 247 building Magic Eden and even I cannot cover all the stuff that's happening in the space, right. It's just, it's just impossible. Like if you ask me something about Deepin right now, I don't really know. Yeah, I haven't really been following it. So it's kind of like when you pick your game then sort of pick your lanes within that, right? Is it Solana Meme coins? Is it NFTs? Is it ordinals? Is it base AI coins? Is it Deepin? There's just like so many different things, right. But like kind of have a former thesis and pick your thing. And then the last thing I would say maybe and this is. Yeah, I don't know if this is like that. I don't even know if I call it advice. But I would just say find a like minded group. Maybe it's friends, others, people you meet online. It's like do it together, you know, just do it together. It's more fun when you're doing it with the crew because I think half the fun of even why I got into the space and why I'm still here, obviously I'm building a company. But even if you just take that aside, it's like the funnest things that I've done in crypto has been just doing things with friends, right. Like grinding white lists for NFTs together. It's like being in the telegram groups and like talking about random coins. Like that stuff is actually that's, that's the really, really amazing stuff that no matter what you end up doing like that I think that is some of the most valuable things that, that at least I find the most fun as well. So yeah, those would be probably the three things that I would, I would, I would suggest.
- [44:14]
Brendan
I love it. That's a, A Great sort of summary and, and way to wrap things up. What was it? It was basically plan your trade and trade your plan. Like you know, know what you're getting into and what your plan is. I love that the second word of wisdom was go deep and specialize, really specialize on, on one lane and then that third one is find a community. And I think, I mean those are, those are great, you know, words of wisdom for, for every part of life really is like plan things out. Like, no, like I'm not being facetious at all. Like I'm genuinely like, it's a, it's a great way to wrap things up because it ties everything together. You plan well, you do one thing really, really well and you do it with good people who are going to bring you up and who are going to help you when you fall or who are going to be a network to help extend you to, oh, I need this person in my, my business. Oh, I know a guy introductions and all that stuff because your network ends up becoming your net worth. And so yeah, I couldn't, couldn't think of ending the show on a better note. Z, it was, it was awesome. I'm really, really bullish and excited on everything you're building at Magic Eden. And where would you suggest folks who are listening, who, you know, kind of got a taste, they're excited, they want to know what's next, where could they stay involved and kind of plugged into what you guys got going on?
- [45:29]
Z Yin
Yeah, for sure. Follow us on X. Obviously at Magic Eden we have like a growing telegram community as well and Discord, so you can find us there too. And yeah, we have like, you know, 100 plus team members all in our community. So if there's any particular things, questions, you can reach out to any of us as well. We're always, we're terminally online so we're around.
- [45:56]
Brendan
That's awesome. Amazing. Well Z, we really appreciate it and truly hope to have you back again sometime later in the year. I know crypto moves fast. You guys are fast building and I know things are going to change and we'll look back six months like, wow, we got to get some updates on this. So whenever that time is, you let us know. We'll have you back and really look forward to seeing what, what you guys cook up next.
- [46:20]
Z Yin
Nice. Thank you guys. Really appreciate it.
- [46:22]
Brendan
You bet. All right, everybody at home listening. Thank you so much. That was Zin, co founder and CH Chief operating officer of Magic Eden. Hope you enjoyed. Give them a follow. Check out the platform and come back next week. We'll got some more great guests for you. Take care.
- [46:48]
Z Yin
Yeah, sure thing. Hey, you sold that car yet?
- [46:52]
Advertisement Host 2
Yeah, sold it to Carvana.
- [46:54]
Z Yin
Oh, I thought you were selling to that guy.
- [46:56]
Advertisement Host 2
The guy who wanted to pay me in foreign currency. No interest over 36 months. Yeah, no. Carvana gave me an offer in minutes, picked it up and paid me on the spot. It was so convenient.
- [47:08]
Z Yin
Just like that?
- [47:09]
Brendan
Yep.
- [47:10]
Z Yin
No hassle?
- [47:11]
Brendan
None.
- [47:11]
Z Yin
That is super convenient.
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