Magic Eden acquires crypto trading app Slingshot to move beyond NFTs
Solana non-fungible token (NFT) market Magic Eden has acquired crypto buying and selling app Slingshot as a part of a method to develop past NFTs as different marketplaces fold amid a chronic market downturn.
The transfer expands Magic Eden’s help to greater than 8 million tokens throughout nearly each main blockchain, the agency said in an April 9 X put up.
“No bridges. No CEXs. That is one other main step in the direction of our imaginative and prescient of offering the perfect platform to commerce all property, on all chains,” Magic Eden stated.
Slingshot has amassed practically 1 million customers so far, permitting customers to entry any token on 10 of the most important blockchains with a common USDC (USDC) steadiness.
Slingshot is one in all a number of crypto platforms aiming to ship full-chain abstraction — eliminating the necessity for customers to decide on the appropriate pockets, guarantee they’ve sufficient gasoline charges, discover a trusted bridge and transfer funds — solely then to purchase the token they’re after.
Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu hopes the combination will assist shift extra of the five hundred million customers nonetheless counting on centralized exchanges towards extra crypto-native, onchain platforms.
NFT marketplaces shutter as market lulls
Lu stated that Magic Eden and Slingshot will proceed to function independently however famous there will likely be “growing connectivity” between the platforms over time.
Lu additionally noted that Magic Eden made $75 million from its NFT market in 2024 and hopes the Slingshot acquisition will assist drive these numbers up even larger.
Associated: Bitcoin NFTs, layer-2 and restaking hype ‘completely gone’
Magic Eden’s growth comes as a number of NFT marketplaces have shuttered in latest months.
DraftKings, GameStop and the crypto exchange Bybit all closed their NFT marketplaces, with Bybit citing falling NFT buying and selling volumes in its April 8 announcement.
X2Y2 additionally not too long ago introduced that its NFT marketplace would shut down on April 30 because the agency seems to be to pivot into synthetic intelligence.
NFT marketplaces have seen $1.6 billion price of NFT gross sales throughout 14 million transactions thus far in 2025, CryptoSlam data reveals.
Nonetheless, month-to-month gross sales quantity has fallen every single month in 2025, and the $1.6 billion is nowhere close to on monitor to match the $8.9 billion total from 2024, not to mention the report $23.7 billion seen in 2022.
