Magic Eden Drops Bitcoin and Ethereum to Concentrate on Solana and iGaming Pivot

Magic Eden is compressing its surface area. The marketplace will discontinue support for Ethereum-compatible and Bitcoin-based assets within two weeks, and its self-custodial wallet will follow by early April. Polygon, Base, Bitcoin Ordinals, and Runes meme coins are all on the chopping block. The platform will keep serving Solana—its 2021 launchbed—while reorienting around its crypto casino and sportsbook, Dicey.

Jack Lu framed the shift plainly on X: finance and entertainment are converging, and the company intends to lean into “the massive opportunity in iGaming.” Dicey’s closed beta is two months in with roughly 200 users and more than $15 million wagered. Earlier this year, Lu positioned Dicey to capture a “speculation supercycle,” echoing the reality that liquidity increasingly congregates where price action feels immediate and games settle fast.

The strategic fulcrum here isn’t anti-EVM or anti-Bitcoin; it’s pro-focus. Magic Eden once grew by going wide—at one point the largest NFT venue by trading volume—pioneering a multi-chain approach and rushing to support Ordinals and later Runes before many top-tier exchanges. But breadth fragments liquidity, product attention, and compliance complexity. Going narrow around Solana gives Magic Eden a single high-throughput, low-latency rail that matches iGaming’s demands: sub-second confirmation, predictable fees, and deep retail familiarity born from Solana’s NFT cycles.

You can see why the knife fell where it did. Last month, Magic Eden handled $576 million in digital collectible volume, mostly on Solana; Bitcoin-based assets accounted for about $121,000, per Dune data. The long tail looks prestigious but commercially thin. Meanwhile, dedicated Ordinals venues are lining up—Taproot Wizards co-founder Udi Wertheimer teased a project-specific marketplace “coming soon”—so offloading BTC-side order flow may prove less costly than it appears.

This isn’t Magic Eden’s first step beyond NFTs. The firm acquired Slingshot Finance last year, a mobile-first crypto trading app, with an eye toward meme coin flows across chains. The new move formalizes the consolidation: fewer rails, tighter product loops, and a platform optimized for wagering, markets, and collectibles under one Solana-first experience.

Two other calls matter for tokenholders. First, Magic Eden will stop NFT buybacks. Second, it plans to refine how the ME token is used across its products. ME currently provides rewards and governance rights; it traded near $0.12 on Friday, down roughly 97% from a $5.63 peak after its December 2024 debut, per CoinGecko. If Dicey becomes the flagship, sustainable token sinks and sources must live where users actually spend time—inside games, markets, and loyalty systems that can withstand volatility and regulatory scrutiny.

Investors have backed Magic Eden’s appetite for reinvention: $140 million raised to date, including a $130 million Series B in 2022 at a $1.6 billion valuation co-led by Greylock and Electric Capital. That kind of cap table tolerates decisive pivots, but it also raises the execution bar. iGaming’s growth potential is real; so are controls around responsible play, fairness (provable randomness), and geofencing. Solana’s technical stack helps with speed and auditability, yet the brand must keep trust with creators and traders after turning off major chains it once championed.

Some will read this as retreat. I read it as a liquidity consolidation bet: compress the product, deepen the flywheel, and build a single venue where speculation, trading, and entertainment rhyme. If the team delivers tight loops between Dicey, Solana NFTs, and ME token utility—without slipping on risk management—the narrower scope could become a moat rather than a constraint.