Sidney Zhang - Magic Eden CTO, Ep. 3

Sidney Zhang (Magic Eden CTO) joins The Zeitgeist to discuss his personal story to crypto and how Magic Eden scaled their way into becoming the top Solana NFT marketplace.

Show Notes

00:42 - Intro / Background
08:46 - What prompted creating Magic Eden on Solana
11:53 - Picking up rust and working in solana
13:57 - Magic Eden: From underdog to behemoth
16:52 - Building at Magic Eden
20:35 - Engineering challenges that were faced
23:01 - What they look for in engineers
27:35 - Evolution of NFTs
29:19 - Builders he admires in the space

Transcript

Brian (00:05):

Hey everyone and welcome to the Zeitgeist, the show where we highlight the founders, developers and designers who are pushing the Web3 space forward. I'm Brian Friel, developer relations at Phantom and I'm super excited to introduce Sidney Zang. Syd is the co-founder in CTO of Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. Syd, how's it going?

Syd (00:29):

Yeah, very good. Thank you for having us.

Brian (00:31):

Thanks so much for being on the show. I'm really excited to talk to you today about what you guys have built with Magic Eden. I'd love to start though if you could give us a little bit of background on who you are and what you were up to before you got started in this space.

Syd (00:43):

Yeah. My name's Sidney. I'm the CEO of Magic Eden. I'll go from the beginning. Actually, when I first graduated from college, I actually started my first crypto company right after college in 2013. At that time, I was the co-organizer of the San Francisco Bitcoin Developer Meetup Group.

Syd (01:01):

And so generally, I was really, really into crypto culture, especially crypto developer culture. I was also contributor to some of the crypto libraries that were used at the time. Funnily enough, my collaborator on the library is JP, the founder of Exodus Wallet, which is a very large wallet.

Brian (01:20):

Oh no way!

Syd (01:20):

Yeah. And JP actually slept in my living room when he was in SF, but shout-out to JP. So at that time, I was really also into crypto consumer products. And at that time, smart contract was just a concept that was coming up. But obviously, there was nothing. The Bitcoin scripting language obviously was not Turing complete, so you couldn't really do much. And so we created a lot of consumer apps that we thought was interesting at the time. We created a second Bitcoin tipper bot where the first tipper bot was on Reddit.

Syd (01:59):

The second tipper bot was on Twitter, and that was the one that we made. Our users started spamming celebrities with Bitcoin tips to create awareness for Bitcoin. That was kind of fun, but ultimately, there wasn't much traction. Another thing that I did was the first big crypto browser wallet, Chrome extension wallet, we built the very first one.

Brian (02:20):

Oh, wow.

Syd (02:22):

No one had started at that point. It was kind of magical. It was really nice, the experience. But eventually, we shut it down because we thought no one would ever be able to make money from a crypto browser wallet like that. Just how can a crypto browser wallet ever be a business, right? It's not possible. So we gave up on that, even though it was really, really cool.

Brian (02:42):

How far we've come on that.

Syd (02:43):

How far we've come, right, since then. And then also back then, I really started thinking about NFT at the time. It wasn't called NFT at the time. It was basically like Bitcoin had this bite code called OP_RETURN that allows you to put 80 bytes of data in there.

Syd (03:02):

It's going to be copyright, so let's hash the image and put the bites into those 80 bites. Obviously, nobody used it, but I thought it was cool to put image on the chain. We created this thing called LoveBlock. And the slogan was like, "Roses are red. Violets are purple. Diamonds are bullshit, but the blockchain is forever."

Syd (03:27):

And so people put love letters in there because the blockchain is forever, so your love would be forever. That obviously also didn't get traction. It was big for a day on Valentine's Day, and then it died the next day.

Brian (03:37):

Big on Valentine's day. Yeah.

Syd (03:39):

So we built a lot of things-

Brian (03:40):

Oh, that's amazing.

Syd (03:41):

... that... That got a lot of attention on Hacker News. That was big for a day, and then it will just inevitably die a few days later. Yeah. And then eventually, I was like, "Wow, it's really hard to do consumer on crypto unless you run an exchange.

Syd (03:58):

So I was like, "You know what? I am going to build a developer API because there are so many developers and they will come up with a consumer product." And because I was a co-organizer of the Bitcoin Developer Meetup Group, it was really natural for me to do that.

Syd (04:12):

So I did that, raised a little bit of money, obviously spent all the money. And as it turns out, the fact that I wasn't able to build a consumer product, nobody else could either. So we ended with all this developer using our API that also couldn't make money and couldn't pay us.

Syd (04:31):

So eventually, the Bitcoin developer API also was not successful. I ran out of money. I had to borrow money from my girlfriend, who is my wife now. So luckily, that worked out.

Brian (04:43):

Nice.

Syd (04:43):

I actually never pay her back because we forgot. 

 

Brian (04:52):

Your gift is probably on the blockchain for her though to still see.

Syd (04:52):

And I ended up living on a boat for a little bit because I was so poor. It's funny, the owner of the boat, Nate, actually works at Magic Eden now.

Brian (05:02):

Wow.

Syd (05:03):

Anyway, it's a long, long place-

Brian (05:05):

What a story.

Syd (05:05):

Yeah. So I was on the boat for a bit in the Alameda Marina. And then eventually, I was like, "Wow, man." I was just bitter about crypto. I was like, "Fuck, crypto sucks."

Syd (05:16):

I was like, "I need a break from crypto," and it was like during the deep bear market at that time.

Brian (05:20):

What year was this?

Syd (05:21):

I think by the time, I think it was 2015 that I left crypto. I joined Uber.

Brian (05:27):

It's one of the earlier bear markets before.

Syd (05:28):

Yeah, that's right.

Brian (05:28):

Yeah. Everyone knows the 2015 one.

Syd (05:31):

Yeah, yeah. I started in 2013. No, I actually started in 2012. Because buying marijuana in Australia where I'm from, I'm from Australia, buying marijuana in Australia was very illegal. And so the best way to buy marijuana as a college student was using Bitcoin.

Syd (05:46):

And so that's how I go into the space. But at the same time, I was very... I had a lot of libertarian kind of leaning. And so the idea of a non-inflationary currency really appealed to me. Anyway, so then 2015, I joined Uber Eats as one of the first engineers there before Uber Eats was a thing. We built Uber Eats.

Brian (06:10):

Yeah.

Syd (06:10):

Uber Eats obviously grew from nothing to like $50 billion GMV or something ridiculous. Right?

Brian (06:18):

I heard you were in the room at the time when it was just a Figma file essentially.

Syd (06:22):

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was. I don't know if it was Figma actually. I think at that time, people didn't use Figma. I think it was-

Syd (06:27):

Yeah. I think they probably used something else, and I can't remember what it was, so yeah. So I would stay with Uber Eats for a few years. I learned a lot there. I was primarily working on all the machine learning initiatives.

Brian (06:39):

Okay.

Syd (06:40):

Ranking, recommendation, search, discovery, little bit pricing, all those things. And then after that, I transitioned. I transferred to ATG, which stands for Advanced Technologies Group, was like the self-driving research lab in... The lab was based out of Toronto.

Syd (06:59):

And so there, I was a research manager. I focused on computer vision. I focused on prediction towards them with a little bit simulation as well. Then after that, I went to Facebook. I was at Facebook AI. And at that time... The whole time, I was just watching crypto, buying tokens, trying to make sense of the madness, but also really exciting at the time.

Syd (07:21):

And then when NFT... But I always really wanted to do something in crypto consumer because that was like what really appealed to me. And I was like, "Hey, I'm not going to go back into crypto until there's a consumer opportunity." And that was something that I really care about.

Syd (07:36):

And then NFT started to take off. And I remember when NFT took off, it was almost like... At one time, I was like, "Fuck, I like all these things." I thought about this in 2013. And then at the same time, how it's happening is nothing like what I thought would happen in 2013.

Brian (07:56):

Right.

Syd (07:56):

I thought about crypto gaming in 2013, but I would never have thought like Game Fire, Symphony. All these things are never... just out of this world. And I was like, "This is just fascinating." And at that point, I was just really sold.

Syd (08:10):

Even though I was at Facebook, honestly, I was like, "Oh, this is amazing." I was just obsessed over  it. And then soon afterwards, I left Facebook and then we started Magic Eden and the rest is history.

Brian (08:21):

The rest is history.

Syd (08:21):

Yeah.

Brian (08:22):

That's great. So somewhere along that journey from the 2015 bear market, you being an early Uber Eats employee and then joined the Facebook, you leveled up, you got out of the houseboat in Alameda, I assume.

Syd (08:33):

Not a houseboat. It was a 24-foot sailing boat that was really small.

Brian (08:39):

Yeah. Amazing. And so at this time, after the 2018 bear market, obviously, there was a lot of activity on Ethereum. What made you pull the trigger to actually start Magic Eden? And why did you pick Solana of all blockchains at the time?

Syd (08:55):

You know, first of all, I think there are a few things, like the stars need to align for you to start a company. And my co-founder, the CEO, Jack, was working at FTX at the time. He was at Google before. Joshen was a product manager at Coinbase. He was employee number two at dYdX.

Syd (09:11):

And then Rex, I've known Rex for very, very long time, always a big crypto degen since I met him at Uber. And so the four of us... And Jack and I, we've known each other since high school. We actually met each other in math tutoring.

Brian (09:26):

Oh, no way.

Syd (09:26):

Which is a very Asian way to meet someone.

Brian (09:29):

Well, you guys are both from Australia. Is that correct too?

Syd (09:31):

From Australia. That's right. Yeah. We're both from Melbourne, went to the same math tutor, Dr. Heath, math coaching.

Brian (09:36):

Wow.

Syd (09:37):

So we've just been talking about crypto for years. We're like, "We want to start something." Right? And so I feel like it's just like we've been paying attention for a long time. That's why the first thing, which is that opportunities come every once in a blue moon.

Syd (09:56):

But the people who are ready to go at that moment are the people that capture the opportunity. And we've just been looking at it for a very long time. We keep following it. So that's probably the first thing. And then there's a question on Solana.

Syd (10:06):

I think our thesis was very much that NFT is what's going to take crypto to mainstream even though, I think, crypto in general is now breaking the same barrier, right? What Coinbase is doing, which is amazing what Crypto.com's doing, what Binance is doing and, to some extent to... and what FTX is doing, crypto is breaking the sound barrier.

Syd (10:31):

But I think ultimately, NFT is going to be that thing that's going to take crypto to the mainstream.

Brian (10:36):

Yeah.

Syd (10:37):

That's when it's going to be like Phantom's going to have... Phantom Wallet's going to have a hundred million users, you know? And then I think a lot of them would be using it because of NFT. Right?

Brian (10:46):

Right.

Syd (10:48):

And I think that for a consumer experience to make sense, I think that the speed of the chain, the chain being designed not to be cheesy web scale, is really, really important. And I think that's what attracted us to Solana.

Syd (11:06):

Even though the ecosystem, the developer ecosystem was raw at the time, it's just a... I would say it's an ecosystem, was just full of energy and the foundation had been very, very warm to us and help us and so on. And I think all these have been very important reasons for why we chose Solana over any other chains.

Brian (11:26):

Yeah. I think that resonates very well with our founding story as well here at Phantom and why we chose a similar path as you guys for similar reasons. You touched on a little bit about how at the start, the developer ecosystem was very raw. And Solana is and still... or was and still is very different than EBM or what you were doing in the earlier days with Bitcoin.

Brian (11:49):

Can you talk a little bit about how that learning process was for you? Obviously, you had a ton of experience from way back in the day. But coming from a Web2 environment, Facebook, Uber, how was picking up ROSS and trying to build your first program on Solana? What did you use to get started?

Syd (12:06):

Oh, Rust isn't hard. Rust is an amazing language. It's probably like Solana smart contract self. They're just nuances. We used Anchor since the beginning, shout to Amani. Amazing. Amazing.

Brian (12:18):

Yeah, putting the industry on his back.

Syd (12:19):

Yeah, and just carrying the industry on his back. I think that when you run into issues, the error message didn't make sense.

Brian (12:30):

Yeah.

Syd (12:32):

Like, "Oh. Well, something broke, 0X75." You're like, "What?" And we just ran into stuff like that. But I think that's the power of open source, right? We just stuck into the core. And if you dig enough, you'll find what's going on.

Syd (12:44):

We're very lucky to have just great people with us along the way, like shout to Andrew from Zeta Market where he really help us a lot from the beginning. Without Andrew, I think there would be no Magic Eden.

Syd (12:56):

And yeah, we crunch really hard at the beginning and we shipped the first product after coding for 10 days.

Brian (13:02):

And when was this? Was this around the end of the summer in 2021?

Syd (13:05):

Yeah. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And we just crunched really hard for 10 days, and then we shipped. And that was how we got started.

Brian (13:15):

Wow.

Syd (13:15):

At that time, there was already very entrenched competition where Solana, DigitalEyes, they were doing... Collectively, they were doing over like a hundred-something million dollars a month-

Brian (13:26):

Yeah. I remember those days.

Syd (13:28):

... in GMV at that time. So they were really, really big. The network effects were very, very strong. Yeah. And it was in that environment that we started. Yeah.

Brian (13:37):

Yeah. I remember those days. You only had one or two mints a day, if that too. So the NFT space was very small. You felt like you could keep track of every project and who was what, and there was just a few…

Syd (13:50):

Not anymore.

Brian (13:50):

Yeah, not anymore. And there was just a few projects or a few marketplaces. But as you said, Solana and a few others just were dominant in market share. How do you guys think that you guys rose to where you are now? You guys basically were an underdog to start. You're an absolute behemoth today. What would you attribute to that success?

Syd (14:16):

I think just to show our company a little bit and talk about culture values, we have four culture values. And the first culture value that we have is customer obsession. The second culture value we have is Web 3.0 over Web 2.0. And what does that mean? Right?

Syd (14:29):

That means that from the very beginning, we knew that it's very important to be in touch with Google culture. And of course, each chain is a little bit different but Solana is definitely like a deep, deep crypto culture, has a deep crypto culture.

Syd (14:45):

I think in crypto community, it's extremely important. Being customer-obsessed, being community-obsessed was that thing that... And I think it sounds cheesy in hindsight. It's like, "Duh." Right.

Brian (14:59):

Mm-hmm.

Syd (15:00):

But actually, when you focus on that, it propagates what you do every single day, you know?

Brian (15:06):

Right.

Syd (15:06):

What we do when the times are good, what we do when we fuck up, when we mess up, we certainly had a fair share of disasters, being honest, being transparent, being obsessed over the customer, their experience, embracing communities. Right?

Syd (15:22):

A lot of the marketplaces at the time were very like... They were like a boys club almost, right?

Brian (15:30):

Mm-hmm.

Syd (15:31):

They were only... The marketplace will only work with you unless you give them a bunch of money or they need to suck up to you before they work with you. There were a lot of that at the time, and we came in and we just went to community first. And all these things, I think, just sound really cheesy now, but it's definitely very true at the time.

Syd (15:53):

And the other thing that I would say that's really cheesy is it really is the little things that matter. It's the things that we did every single day that then gradually build up our reputation and our trust with the users. To the program's point, I read this article that he wrote a long time ago. It's like, "Do the things that don't scale."

Syd (16:15):

And we really focused on doing things that don't scale at the beginning. And the interesting thing is that if you focus on doing things that don't scale and you do it enough, and if you're smart, you'll find a way to make them scale too.

Brian (16:27):

Yeah. Right.

Syd (16:29):

But anyway, I think very cheesy, but also very true. And I think all these truism, cheesy truisms, they become cheesy because it's so true.

Brian (16:38):

Right.

Syd (16:39):

So if... Yeah.

Brian (16:41):

And that's Paul Graham of Y Combinator who coined that phrase and obviously, he's seen probably more startups do that than anybody alive today.

Syd (16:49):

For sure.

Brian (16:50):

That's amazing. I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about how you guys build products at Magic Eden. Obviously, you're the CTO. What is the engineering culture like? How do you guys decide what to build, who builds it? There's a ton going on. You guys have a lot of products. Can you shed a little light on what that process is like for you guys?

Syd (17:08):

Yeah. I think I would probably talk about a few things. One is how do we drive prioritization? The second is how do we organize our team? And then the third thing that I'll probably emphasize on is how do we... Autonomy. What does autonomy mean to me? Right?

Syd (17:28):

And I'm hinting because our teams are generally very autonomous. They get a lot of power over what they do. One is like prioritization. Generally, prioritization is driven in the way that's ideas are generally very bottom-up and prioritization will drive very hard top down.

Syd (17:44):

I think all the founders, we generally have a very opinionated division for how we want to take this. And we use metrics as a prioritization framework, and we drive towards that. And that's how we then make decisions on a resourcing standpoint like what to work on, what not to work on.

Syd (18:01):

But more importantly, I would say generally, startups are all about execution. You can do the same thing, but someone else will do better than you. Right? And marketplaces certainly are not really about who has the most longest checklist of features, right?

Syd (18:20):

Generally, every marketplace quickly are feature parity with each other. But how you do it, how you execute really matters. And in this case, we do have product managers in the company. But I would say that a senior engineer and a senior designer at Magic Eden, they're in parallel, a junior product manager too.

Syd (18:39):

We really make sure that our engineers and designers, they own the user journey and they care about the user journey. And it's up to them to produce a really good user journey. We make our product managers back off from the details and let the engineers and designer drive the details.

Syd (18:56):

And we formed this thing called squads or pods where the squad is a self-contained organization that is led autonomously by a lead. And within a squad, it's very full stack. For example, in a squad, building a feature, marketing person will be in there.

Syd (19:13):

If there's any partnership that we're doing, a partnership person will be in there, for example. And as such, each squad operates like a startup within Magic Eden, and just their goal is a sub-goal of Magic Eden's overall goals. Right? And so that actually allows us to ship really fast, operate really quickly.

Brian (19:33):

Yep.

Syd (19:33):

And I think the last thing that I would probably mention is the word autonomy. I think people love the word autonomy, and that's how companies use that word to hire people. But autonomy to me is not really about autonomy at all.

Syd (19:51):

To me, autonomy is about what to do when things go wrong and being okay with that. We really do give trust to our engineers and our designers to make decisions to ship. And then if things go wrong, fix it. And the only thing that... I joke about it, but the only thing I ask our team is like, "Hey, we trust you to make judgment calls. That's why we hire you because we trust your judgment calls. 


 

Brian (20:18):

Yeah. Right.

Syd (20:18):

We just want you to be correct? 70% of the time.

 

Brian (20:21):

Yeah.

Syd (20:23):

"So also, don't make this... Don't be the decision maker and be wrong 80% of the time too. Right?" But-

Brian (20:29):

Right.

Syd (20:29):

But those are some of the, I would say, important points in how we run the eng team.

Brian (20:34):

Yeah. Prioritizing shipping over asking for permission.

Brian (20:37):

How has that worked for you guys as you guys have scaled? What are some of the biggest engineering challenges that you have come up against? Do you think it'll persist throughout the lifetime of Magic Eden, or do you see a need for this to change? How has scale brought this to the front for you guys?

Syd (20:55):

Companies like TikTok still operates like this today. And TikTok have thousands of engineers, right? They still operate this way today. And I will say that Facebook... We know a lot of early Facebookers. Facebook operated this way for a very, very long time as well.

Syd (21:13):

And I think the squad model does scale. At least it will scale to the point... to the range of having hundreds of engineers and still have this kind of squad model. The first time I heard this squad model is from Ryan Sokol. Ryan Sokol is a mentor and investor of mine. He runs engineering at DoorDash, used to run engineering for Uber Eats.

Brian (21:32):

Okay.

Syd (21:32):

The engineering team, I think it's about 2,000 engineers or something like that.

Brian (21:36):

Wow.

Syd (21:37):

And even them, they still run a squad model till today. Not to the extent we do it, because our squads are even looser than them. Each month, we form new squads. Their squads are more stable, but they still do this till today, to some extent, not as deep as we are, but I think this will scale.

Syd (21:56):

In terms of engineering challenges, I would say that people that follow Magic Eden know that in January, we had a string of outages. We really got that under control now, and thank you to the community for sticking with us. And then now, Solana, TPS, you guys, you guys must feel it too. Right?

Syd (22:21):

I think along the way, we do have periods of challenges like that. But I see that using the word challenge is almost the wrong word. It's really privileges. We're lucky to be in this position.

Brian (22:33):

Yeah. I like that.

Syd (22:35):

And it's all thanks to our community.

Brian (22:37):

Yeah. No, I think that comes back to what you said earlier too about how it takes so much work, doing the little things every day to earn that trust. And you can lose that trust of the community very quick. But I agree. I think both our companies are in a position now.

Brian (22:50):

Solana, as it's hitting the mainstream, there's a lot we can do to really lead the way and help-

Syd (22:55):

Yeah.

Brian (22:56):

... best practices, help this thing scale and communicate that well and be good stewards of the community here.

Syd (23:02):

Yeah.

Brian (23:05):

You mentioned a little bit. Your team's growing, you have these pods, you rotate a lot. What do you look for as you guys are growing? What do you look for in an engineer who decides, "I want to work in Magic Eden"? I imagine you took on... You mentioned being a self-starter and having that autonomy. Is that one of the main things you guys look for?

Syd (23:26):

Yeah. I think one of the... I told you two out of four cultural values. The fourth cultural value that we have is a champion's mindset. And what does that mean? Right? I think that running a marketplace is really hard, for real, like-

Brian (23:47):

Yeah.

Syd (23:48):

You know? You might not realize just how hard it is to run a marketplace. It's really, really hard. And what's harder than running a secondary marketplace is running a primary marketplace when we have a Launchpad product. That's even harder.

Brian (24:02):

And running both together at the same time.

Syd (24:04):

Yeah. They're really, really, really difficult. On Solana, there're like 10, 15 Launchpad copycats that saw our success in Launchpad and they try to copy us. Many of them are shutting down. Many of them are not doing as well as they might hope or like... And the reason is actually, this is very, very difficult.

Syd (24:26):

It's much harder than it looks on the outside. All this stuff is very simple. But simplicity is actually like... There's enormous amount of work to hide the complexity, to be simple on the front end.

Brian (24:38):

Yes.

Syd (24:39):

And I think that when we hire engineers, we look for... I say this other times like first and foremost, I look for heart over experience. I look for talent over experience. And what I mean by that is that high is this willingness to win. You know?

Brian (24:58):

Yeah.

Syd (24:58):

And the willingness to really... Understanding what the user wants is a very tedious thing to do. You got to put a lot of work to figure that out, and you need to be willing to put in the work. You need to be willing to move quickly because crypto moves really quickly.

Syd (25:15):

You need to be willing to get out your comfort zone and move around, do new things all the time. And then at the same time, we also really look for people with raw talents. They're engineers in the company, they're very young, but they're just extraordinarily talented.

Syd (25:30):

And you can tell that they're the people that given the opportunity, they'll be better than someone with 10 years of experience. And we really look for those people too. And lastly, we do have... We don't have a conveyor belt. We think about team composition.

Syd (25:46):

And I think in many ways, Google, Facebook, Uber, worked in all these companies, they have a very com conveyor belt process for hiring. It's just like they hire the same people overall. Again, they don't care about what each person's good at or like, or whatever. They just chuck them on a team and just soldiers. Right?

Brian (26:04):

Mm-hmm.

Syd (26:05):

We really think about team composition. You know, we have engineers here that are very degen. We also hire a lot of people from Google. I'm going to say hi to the Google Ads team. Thank you for giving us so many people. We have a lot of people from Facebook. So we have a very diverse range of people that come from very diverse backgrounds.

Syd (26:25):

And that diversity is what allows us to compose the team. And some people are a lot more product-conscious. Some people might not care that much about product, but they're just very good at dealing with scale. And we have all of those people too, so yeah.

Brian (26:39):

That's great. You mentioned accountability, you mentioned customer obsession, you mentioned mindset of a champion. Is there a fourth that I didn't get hint to that?

Syd (26:48):

Oh, no. So it is customer obsession. It is Web 3.0 over Web 2.0, really embrace Web3.0.

Brian (26:54):

Web 3.0 over Web 2.0.

Syd (26:54):

It is champion's mindset and it is unity and ownership.

Brian (26:58):

Okay.

Syd (27:00):

And this, I'm going to give credit to Jack. Jack, before Google, he was at BCG, Boston Consulting Group 

Brian (27:07):

This is the CEO of Magic Eden.

Syd (27:08):

Yeah. Yeah. That's a management consulting firm. And at Google, he was in strategy and then in product. And he was self-confessed as a reorg specialist. And he's done probably 20 reorgs more and he realized just as a company scales, people can start competing with each other within the company instead of uniting as a team to compete with your competitors.

Syd (27:33):

Instead of trying to deliver the best experience for your user and focus on your own community, people can start thinking about how do you create, then grab, carve out your own thing. Right? And so we very intentionally make that as part of culture value. And there's a lot that we do to make sure that we unite as a team to deliver an experience for our user and be better than our competitors so that we earn our users' trust. Right? Yeah.

Brian (28:01):

That's great. So looking ahead here for a little bit, how do you see the NFT space evolving? What are you most excited about ?

Syd (28:12):

I think that the most important use case today in NFT is obviously community and PFP, and then that, then [inaudible] utility, right? That, to me, I'm extremely bullish on. I think that that's obviously something that's like this need for community and being a part of a community and then having an ownership as an entry to the community, but also being able to transfer that to someone else is extremely valuable.

Syd (28:44):

I think that what's coming is going to be... in terms of next big caliber is going to be gaming.

Brian (28:49):

Gaming. Yeah.

Syd (28:50):

And you can see that we have Eden Games, which is a completely gaming-focused NFT experience. Soon, we'll release a market report like a Q1 lookback, and we're going to talk a lot about gaming. So guys, look out for our Q1 report.

Brian (29:05):

Nice.

Syd (29:05):

And we're going to talk a lot about gaming. We work with many, many game studios yet to launch. And if you know you're a game studio, that you're looking on any chain, that you're thinking about this, come say hi. Reach out to us anytime. And I think there's just so much exciting stuff that's coming that you will see in the next two, three months. Yeah.

Brian (29:26):

I couldn't agree more. We're super excited for gaming and so much else that this space has in store for us., 

Syd (29:34):

Out of all the gaming marketplaces, we probably have the largest gaming focus. And certainly in Solana, vast majority of gaming NFT happens on Magic Eden, and we want to continue that way, and yeah.

Brian (29:55):

That's great. Super exciting stuff. Well, Syd, this has been awesome. Thanks so much for your time. Just before we go, I'd love to ask you this question. Who is a builder that you admire in the Solana ecosystem.

 

Syd (30:14):

I think we have to start with Anatoly and Raj for creating the Solana ecosystem. I think that there are a lot of decisions, small decisions, technical decisions that they make that were just like, "That's right." That makes Solana scale and also just made it... I would say very easy to work with if you want to operate a scale. And I think that's really important.

Syd (30:31):

I really also very admire the Phantom team. Seriously. Obviously, we've been in the trenches since the beginning. We've known each other for a long time. But just seeing how the Phantom team operates, how the Phantom team executes is quite inspirational. And it's lucky to be able to call myself a compatriot, that we really grew together since the beginning. Yeah?

Brian (30:55):

Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Syd (30:56):

It's really crazy. And then thank you so much for having me on this podcast. Awesome.

Brian (31:02):

Likewise. Well, the feelings mutual. We really admire you guys. Thank you for what you do, driving this industry forward, and thanks for being the first guest here on the pod.

Syd (31:11):

Thank you. Thank you very much. Bye.