Magic Eden unveils ME token, eyeing expansion beyond NFT sector

The NFT marketplace is also planning a pivot to fungible token trading

August 22, 2024 01:21 pm

Magic Eden and Adobe Stock modified by Blockworks

ME Foundation, the entity behind the NFT marketplace Magic Eden, announced the launch of its token ME on Thursday.

Magic Eden joins a slew of other NFT marketplaces like Blur, LooksRare, X2Y2, Tensor and Sudoswap in launching a token. OpenSea is now the last major holdout in that group.

ME will be claimable via the Magic Eden wallet on mobile and desktop, while details around its supply and distribution will be announced at a later date. US users will not be able to claim ME.

Magic Eden launched as a NFT trading platform for Solana in 2021, later expanding to Polygon and Base.

The marketplace saw a significant jump in activity after it integrated Bitcoin NFTs during the Ordinals and Runes hype earlier this year. Since then, Magic Eden’s processed about 80% of all Bitcoin NFT secondary trading volume in the last year, according to NFT Pulse.

Across all chains in the same time period, Magic Eden processed about $2.9 billion (24%) of NFT trading volumes in total.

Amid a depressed NFT market, Magic Eden seems to be pursuing a mobile-centric strategy to pivot beyond NFT trading to enable cross-chain trading of fungible crypto tokens like bitcoin and ether.

Magic Eden’s token announcement comes off the back of its mobile app launch for the marketplace’s native wallet Wednesday, which has at least 250,000 monthly active users.

The ME token aims to attract users from outside the Magic Eden ecosystem to adopt its open source protocols and token, while also to “incentivize users to trade any asset on the biggest chains at any time,” the official press release said.

The total NFT market cap today sits around $42 billion, still far below its all-time high of $617 billion in May 2022, according to Coinmarketcap.

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