2022: The Year of The Community DAO

A community DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) or a tokenomic organization is all about the vibes. Like-minded individuals come together on Discord servers, making collective decisions in pursuit of a shared vision.

Blockchains decentralize trust between computers but DAOs decentralize trust between humans. DAOs are a new form of organization. This mode of coordination unlocks the human potential for collaboration. What’s so revolutionary about DAOs is that it provides an internet-native avenue for capturing value.

A Brief DAO History: Exploring features of decentralized technology and how it’d impact the way organizations operate, the initial acronym used was DAC (decentralized autonomous corporations). The term ‘DAO’ can be traced back to 2014 when Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin penned ‘DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide’.

From this definition, a DAO is interconnected with software protocol which informs its operation. In 2016, we saw ‘code is law’ in practice with the first DAO, ‘The DAO’ which was a decentralized venture fund raising over $150M in ETH. Unfortunately, they were hacked a month after their launch. Several years later, DAOs grew in popularity thanks to the Ethereum blockchain community. 

DAOs x NFTs: We’ve seen ‘DAO’ repeatedly on the roadmap of NFT projects. Instead of “social” tokens, holders gain access to DAOs through their non-fungible tokens. Their NFTs serve as both representative ownership and governance rights. DAOs invest in other NFTs, build cool things together or just share alpha. 

NFT DAOs on Solana: MonkeDAO secures the Solana network as the first DAO to operate a validator node. They’ve recently launched DAOPool, Solana’s first community staking pool for DAOs. There’s also SockDAO who created MIMO, an NFT fractionalization project that is breaking barriers of entry to the top SMB NFTs. Valuing their SMB #3408, one of the shirtless seven, at approximately 4000 SOL, they’re making monke for the people! Then there’s ThugDAO doing things for the culture like a music label to elevate independent artists. Rappers like Young Thug and Wiz Khalifa rep ThugBirdz and the possibilities of collaboration is definitely one to watch. 

🎧 Listen to Innovation in DAOs where we speak to MonkeDAO, SockDAO and ThugDAO, on Eden Hour, our brand-new podcast! 

Eden Hour is hosted by Magic Eden’s Head of Marketing, Tiff, alongside co-host DJ Trix where they hold important and interesting conversations that help grow the long-term Solana NFT ecosystem. We’ll be having creators, thought leaders and friends on the show. So, tune in!

In Episode Zero, we spoke to Magic Eden’s co-founders who shared the story behind Magic Eden. Listen here and check out the notes that @bernardchancl made!

We’re on Spotify and Apple Music too! 

📣 Big Things: We’re transitioning to an open listing model

In the span of three months, we shifted from new kid on the block to the leading NFT marketplace on Solana. Big shoutout to YOU, the creators, collectors and supporters of NFTs on Solana. 👏

“As a platform, we’ve been super lucky to reach the lion’s share. We’re also cognisant about what we’ve achieved. From a creator standpoint and for collectors, we want to serve them better,” said COO Zhuoxun Yin. Given the incredible growth of NFTs on Solana, we think the best way to do this is by moving to an open listing model. 

If you’ve been keeping tabs on NFTs on Solana, it may have been hard to keep up with dozens of collections launching every day. Our team works hard to vet and list each collection quickly, carefully and consistently on Magic Eden. This has proven to be challenging. But, it’s a good problem to have. Why? The ecosystem is growing! 

Here’s our solution: 

1. Community-led flagging mechanism and escalation paths
2. Badging system for listings to help users make more informed choices  + Open Listing model

We believe that the community wants to get involved. “We come from a point of view that’s like hey, the community can help a lot and they do. We want to empower them to do so and at the same time, give them the information they need,” said our CEO Jack Lu.

“We want to move away from binary outcomes — good or bad — to more of a spectrum where there’s objective information, from us or other people because frankly, different people value different things but information is something that we can surface and provide,” Zhuoxun Yin added. We think that the open listing model is a proper reflection of the rapidly expanding NFT landscape for both creators and collectors. 

A day ago, we hosted our first townhall AMA… and someone featured us in their song?! We also got asked a question about audio NFTs and our plans to integrate them. “You bring the audio and I’ll get it done tomorrow,” said CTO Sidney Zhang. But seriously, our eng team works really, really fast. Side note: Music NFTs may be the next big thing.

We’ve written about our open listing model extensively here. Your feedback is invaluable to us and we’d appreciate it if you shared your thoughts on our Discord channel to help us refine these ideas further in the upcoming days before launch.

🪄 Congrats, This Week's Top Performing Collections on ME! (12/15-21)

1. The Catalina Whale Mixer 44,206 SOL
2. Baby Ape Social Club 37,811 SOL
3. Shadowy Super Coder DAO 20,427 SOL
4. ChainMyth 15,762 SOL
5. Enviro 15,494 SOL
6. Danger Valley Ducks 15,167 SOL
7. Monkey Kingdom 12,676 SOL
8. Zillaz 10,203 SOL
9. Boryoku Dragonz 8,600 SOL
10. CyberKeys 6,182 SOL

🚀 Launchpad Releases

Launchpad is Magic Eden’s white-glove full-minting support service with cutting edge capabilities, outbound marketing support and automatic listing. We provide the widest reach, exposure and tools for creators to launch their collections on Solana.

Raydium

Good news to RAYdiators: You’re invited to Raydium x Magic Eden’s holiday party! 🎄 

If you’ve staked RAY on Raydium, you’ll have access to an exclusive holiday NFT on the 23rd of Dec, which will give you access to receive Magic Eden platform fee rebates — 2% cash back — on any NFT bought or sold on http://nft.raydium.io until Dec 31, 23:59 UTC.

To qualify, you would need to have staked RAY before Dec 23, 10:00 UTC for the holiday mint and fee rebate! Platform rebates will be retroactively distributed to any wallet that buys or sells an NFT on Raydium’s NFT platform, powered by Magic Eden. 

Nekoverse 

Welcome to the Nekoverse! Nekoverse is a play-to-earn MMORPG game that involves battles, resource farming, item crafting, breeding and ‘summoning’. Start at Level 1 and gain experience by participating in core gameplay to level up. 

Nekos can also have professions which provide Nekos with corresponding boosts when participating in game activities. It also deepens character development which allows players to gradually specialize in their P2E styles. Some of the professions are Blacksmith, Alchemist, Hunters and Merchants. 

Launchpad Mint: 26 Dec, 3PM UTC, 1,000 Nekos, 1 SOL. 

Public mint takes place the same day at 5PM UTC on their website.

We’re looking for creators who need mint support 👀

Over the last month, our dev team has been hard at work developing internal tools so that we can serve more creators with Magic Eden Launchpad. Before, we could only serve a handful of Launchpads a month. Over the last two weeks, we hosted 7 drops on Launchpad. We are proud to share that 7 out of 7 launches went smoothly without any glitches and sold out!

Here’s a few reasons why creators like using Launchpad:

• Our capabilities: we support many features including presale, whitelist (including WL discounts), pre-mint, flexibility to mint with any token on Solana, limiting mint quantity per wallet address.
• Flexible formats: creators can mint via our site or we can add a mint button to their sites! Also, coming soon we’ll be rolling our minting via auction. Stay tuned!
• Outbound marketing support: get exposure to the Solana ecosystem across our social channels including different marketing benefits across 3 tiers of pricing
• Security and peace of mind: support from a dedicated team, anti-bot captcha solution that guarantees fair distribution of NFTs per wallet, and a crash-proof website with the ability to handle 126M API requests per day

Have an upcoming drop? Apply to Launchpad today!