Magic Eden acquires crypto buying and selling app Slingshot to maneuver past NFTs

Solana non-fungible token (NFT) market Magic Eden has acquired crypto buying and selling app Slingshot as a part of a technique to develop past NFTs as different marketplaces fold amid a chronic market downturn.

The transfer expands Magic Eden’s assist to greater than 8 million tokens throughout virtually each main blockchain, the agency mentioned in an April 9 X publish.

“No bridges. No CEXs. That is one other main step in the direction of our imaginative and prescient of offering the very best platform to commerce all belongings, on all chains,” Magic Eden mentioned.

Slingshot has amassed practically 1 million customers thus far, permitting customers to entry any token on 10 of the most important blockchains with a common USDC (USDC) steadiness.

Slingshot is certainly one of a number of crypto platforms aiming to ship full-chain abstraction — eliminating the necessity for customers to decide on the suitable pockets, guarantee they’ve sufficient fuel 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 mentioned that Magic Eden and Slingshot and Magic Eden will proceed to function independently however famous there might be “rising connectivity” between the platforms over time.

Lu additionally famous that Magic Eden made $75 million from its NFT market in 2024 and hopes the Slingshot acquisition will assist drive these numbers up even increased.

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Magic Eden’s enlargement comes as a number of NFT marketplaces have shuttered in current months.

DraftKings, GameStop and the crypto change Bybit all closed their NFT marketplaces, with Bybit citing falling NFT buying and selling volumes in its April 8 announcement.

X2Y2 additionally lately introduced that its NFT market would shut down on April 30 because the agency seems to pivot into synthetic intelligence.

NFT marketplaces have seen $1.6 billion price of NFT gross sales throughout 14 million transactions to date in 2025, CryptoSlam information reveals.

Nevertheless, month-to-month gross sales quantity has fallen each single month in 2025, and the $1.6 billion is nowhere close to on observe to match the $8.9 billion whole from 2024, not to mention the report $23.7 billion seen in 2022.

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