Tiffany Huang claims that Solana’s “superpower” is its transaction capacity, which is attributed to its low transaction fees and fast speeds.
But, Huang wonders, how does this advantage translate to real-world applications? More importantly, she asks, “Why does anyone care outside of crypto?”
On the Lightspeed podcast (Spotify/Apple), the CEO of Magic Eden says the NFT story needs to change. Rather than being driven by speculation and technology, the story should be driven by use cases, she says, with a greater emphasis on “collecting moments” and the ability to foster connections between creators and collectors.
Magic Eden, the most visited NFT exchange powered by the Solana network, brings with it a “highly engaged group of users who are very real and have proven themselves over time,” says Huang. According to Huang, the exchange generated “ten times as many transactions as Opensea” by 2022, with an average session length of 14 minutes – one and a half times longer than the average user sessions on TikTok.
Huang sees NFTs gaining wider appeal as collectibles, used by makers to gain a better understanding of their collectors. “This is a problem that exists in Web2,” she says. “You can’t differentiate between who views your content and who would actually spend money on your content.”
“You can’t tell your fans from your superfans,” she says. The exchange’s distribution capacity and ability to obtain detailed knowledge about their users gives the exchange clear advantages in this regard, says Huang. “That’s where I think there are some really interesting things for Magic Eden to play with.”
Becoming friends with PFPs
While the 10K PFP collection is now widely considered a tired format, it’s the “only use case that has worked so far,” said Zhuoxun Yin, co-founder of Magic Eden. “There must be a lot of other types of creators that need to try things out for NFTs,” he says.
Yin reflects on post-ICO statements that ERC-20 tokens were “dead,” noting that many new form factors based on the technology emerged during market dills, such as governance models, token incentives, and DeFi. “All that stuff came after people labeled tokens as dead.”
“People often forget this universal truth,” adds Huang, “the current version of NFTs really blossomed during the pandemic because people wanted to make friends.”
“That’s why NFTs are different from fungibles,” she says. “They’re emotional by nature.”
“NFTs will continue to be a way for people to connect and form deeper relationships,” she says. “I just don’t know if the 10,000 PFP stock is going to be the thing that brings the next bull back.”
Internet-level access to everything
“We need to dig into the things that make the properties of NFTs really interesting,” says Yin. “All we’ve really done is we’ve basically referenced NFTs to images.”
“You can make a lot of these things programmable in a lot of ways,” he adds. “Hardly anyone has touched that surface.”
Yin is intrigued by NFTs’ ability to “improve internet-level access for everything.”
“It is no longer limited to things that are physically possible,” he explains. “You suddenly have Internet-level scale for everything you do with NFTs.”
“That makes this design space the most interesting of all crypto.”