In March 2024, Magic Eden processed $734 million in a single month and commanded 80% of all Bitcoin Ordinals and Runes trading volume. By March 2026, those marketplaces will be dark. The wallet is next. This is the complete breakdown - the rise, the data, the collapse, and what it means for everything built on Bitcoin NFTs.
Sources close to the company told Blockspace that Magic Eden is shutting down its Bitcoin Ordinals and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) marketplaces in the first week of March 2026. The multi-chain wallet - downloaded over 100,000 times on Android - enters export-only mode in mid-March before full discontinuation in early April.
One thing survives: Solana. Magic Eden is retreating to its origin chain and doubling down on what CEO Jack Lu calls the "speculation supercycle" - prediction markets, token trading, and a crypto casino/sportsbook product called "Dicey" launching in Q1 2026.
Magic Eden's retreat didn't happen in a vacuum. The entire Bitcoin NFT ecosystem cratered. The numbers are severe:
Bitcoin-based NFT sales dropped 79% from Q1 2024 to full-year 2025 (Cointelegraph/Bitlayer data). Q1 2024 alone generated $1.4 billion. All of 2025 combined: $291 million. That is not a correction. That is structural demand destruction.
| Metric | Peak | 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Total NFT sales revenue | ~$8.9B (2024) | $5.63B | -37% |
| Avg NFT sale price | $124 (2024) | $96 | -23% |
| Art NFT volume | $2.9B (2021) | $23.8M (Q1 2025) | -93% |
| NFT sales Q1 2025 | Prior quarter | -63% QoQ | -63% |
| Total annualized NFT vol (2025) | $8.9B (2024) | $5.5B | -38% |
The NFT market as a whole collapsed. Art NFTs dropped 93% from their 2021 peak. Q1 2025 saw a 63% quarter-over-quarter decline in total sales. Running a multi-chain NFT infrastructure in this environment means burning money on engineering, compliance, and liquidity subsidies for a market that is actively shrinking.
The Bitcoin halving in April 2024 was supposed to be Ordinals' second act. Runes - a fungible token standard built on Bitcoin by Casey Rodarmor - launched simultaneously with the halving and briefly generated enormous fee revenue for Bitcoin miners. Magic Eden was first to market with Runes trading.
Within weeks, Runes activity collapsed. The speculation that drove the launch faded with no meaningful utility underneath. Magic Eden had built infrastructure for a market that proved to be noise rather than signal. The fact that they are now exiting Bitcoin entirely is the clearest possible verdict on whether Runes delivered.
As Bitcoin Ordinals collapsed, NFT volume consolidated around Solana and a handful of blue-chip Ethereum collections (Pudgy Penguins, Milady). Solana NFT volume proved more resilient - which is precisely why Magic Eden is retreating there.
The multi-chain NFT thesis - that all chains would have thriving NFT ecosystems simultaneously - did not materialize. Solana won NFTs. Ethereum won blue-chips. Bitcoin tried and failed.
Magic Eden's pivot to "crypto entertainment" is not irrational given what the data shows. CEO Jack Lu has been telegraphing this for over a year. Fungible token trading was already 20% of Magic Eden's business by late 2024. Prediction markets hit $814 million in daily volume in early 2026. The Dicey casino/sportsbook product targets a market that has shown far more sustained activity than NFT trading.
The economics are simple: maintaining Bitcoin and EVM marketplace infrastructure requires ongoing engineering resources, security audits, compliance work, and liquidity. When those chains generate a declining fraction of revenue, the cost-benefit calculation flips. Cut the overhead, concentrate resources on Solana where you still have defensible dominance, and chase the next wave.
The December 2024 $ME token airdrop was Solana-based. Not Bitcoin-based. Not multi-chain. Solana. That decision - made months before this announcement - was the tell. The token and the platform's future were already aligned around a single chain. Shutting down Bitcoin and EVM is completing a strategic pivot that was already underway, not starting a new one.
Magic Eden has also announced that 15% of platform revenue will go toward $ME buybacks and yield. That creates a direct financial incentive to maximize Solana platform revenue - which means no resources should go to underperforming chains.
Paradigm led Magic Eden's Series B at the $1.6 billion valuation. Paradigm also backs significant infrastructure in the prediction markets and DeFi space that Magic Eden is now pivoting toward.
This is not a conspiracy - it is how venture capital works. Investors have portfolio visibility and can see which sectors are growing versus contracting. When your lead backer has thesis-level conviction in "crypto entertainment" and your Bitcoin NFT business is collapsing 79% year-over-year, the direction you pivot is predictable.
"We certainly are not retrenching our investment into NFTs; we are ramping it up even more." - Jack Lu, Magic Eden CEO (late 2024)
That quote aged badly in about 14 months. The gap between what CEOs say publicly and what the data forces them to do is always instructive. Magic Eden was signaling confidence while the exit strategy was already forming.
Magic Eden was not just a marketplace for Ordinals - for most of its existence it was the Ordinals market. 80% share means its exit leaves a structural liquidity hole that competitors will struggle to fill.
Unisat is the next largest Ordinals marketplace and will absorb some volume. OKX has an Ordinals marketplace as part of its broader Web3 wallet product. Neither commands the brand recognition or liquidity depth that Magic Eden built. When the dominant platform exits any market, bid-ask spreads widen and price discovery weakens. Ordinals holders should expect a liquidity crunch in March.
The deeper question is whether Ordinals was ever more than speculation infrastructure. The protocol is technically real - inscriptions on Bitcoin are permanent and immutable. But the demand for those inscriptions proved highly cyclical and dependent on platform support that is now evaporating. Without Magic Eden's market-making and discovery layer, the ecosystem is significantly smaller.
Solana NFT ecosystem - Magic Eden concentrates all resources here. More engineering, more marketing, more liquidity incentives flowing to Solana.
Unisat and OKX - inherit displaced Ordinals volume, though at a fraction of previous totals.
$ME token holders - if the pivot works, a focused Magic Eden in a growing prediction market should generate more revenue than a spread-thin multi-chain NFT platform in a shrinking market.
| Round | Date | Amount | Key Investors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Seed | Late 2021 | $27M | Sequoia, Lightspeed, Electric Capital |
| Series B | Jun 2022 | $130M | Paradigm, Sequoia, Greylock, Electric Capital, Lightspeed |
| Total | - | $157M | 13 investors total |
The Series B was raised in June 2022 - deep into the NFT bull market, at peak valuation. Paradigm, Sequoia, and Greylock are not known for writing off investments quietly. The pivot to crypto entertainment is the mechanism by which they attempt to recover value from a $1.6 billion bet in a market that no longer exists at that scale.
Magic Eden built something genuinely impressive. 90% of Solana NFT volume within months of launch. 80% of Bitcoin Ordinals within a week. $734M in a single month. The execution was real.
What killed it was not a failure of execution - it was a failure of the market they chose to serve. Bitcoin Ordinals lost 79% of volume in 12 months. Art NFTs dropped 93% from peak. The multi-chain NFT thesis collapsed under its own weight. No amount of engineering fixes structural demand destruction.
The pivot to Solana-native crypto entertainment is logical given what they still own: dominant position on the one chain where NFT activity remained resilient, a live token with buyback mechanics, and a user base that actually transacts. Cutting the dead weight is not a failure - it is survival.
But the people who built collections on Bitcoin Ordinals, who held assets in the Magic Eden wallet, who bought into the multi-chain vision that Magic Eden sold loudly in 2023 and 2024 - they just watched that vision get quietly buried. Move your assets. The window is narrowing.