Magic Eden Acquires Slingshot, the Decentralised Trading App, to Expand Its Footprint Beyond NFTs

input: Magic Eden, the leading NFT marketplace, made a big shot on Wednesday by acquiring the decentralised trading app, Slingshot.

Magic Eden, the premier NFT marketplace, has made a significant move by acquiring the decentralized trading app, Slingshot. This acquisition aims to expand Magic Eden's services beyond NFTs and position it as a major player in cross-chain trading. Following this acquisition, Slingshot's services will be directly integrated into Magic Eden's NFT marketplace.

As reported by The Block, this acquisition will allow users to seamlessly swap tokens like ETH, SOL, MATIC, and other tokens used in various NFT ecosystems.

Slingshot, which rebranded to its existing name in 2020, is a decentralized trading platform where users can swap crypto tokens between multiple chains. These chains include Ethereum, Polygon, Optimism, Arbitrum, and others without the complicated setup.

It enables trading on all EVM L2s and allows the same USD to be used for trading tokens like BTC, SOL, and ETH.

To facilitate cross-chain swaps, Slingshot employs a liquidity aggregation engine to enable cross-chain swaps, aggregating crypto tokens from multiple DEXs and liquidity pools.

Now, with the integration of the NFT leader, Magic Eden, users will be able to perform token swaps directly via the NFT marketplace. This will significantly help users in quickly acquiring the native tokens they need for minting or bidding on NFTs.

Can the New Team Up Compete with CEXs?

In its press release, Magic Eden aims to move beyond the rigid concept of centralization and compete with the leading Centralised Exchanges (CEXs) by bringing AI-assisted research to allow users to quickly and efficiently discover their preferred tokens.

Further, it will allow users to bring funds from Apple Pay, Venmoe, or Credit Card.

Announcing the news on X, Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu said that with this move they aim to bring all the 500M crypto users to on-chain by “making crypto easy” for everyone.

He also said, “With Slingshot’s chain abstraction tech, we’ll accelerate new token trading features to compete w/ CEXs.”

Its competition ambitions can be possible since most CEXs support a limited number of cross-chain pairs. But Slingshot lets users quickly swap across chains without bridging or off-ramping. This can be a huge win for DeFi-native traders.

Further, it offers low gas and zero trading fees and a simple login process. However, CEXs like Binance, Coinbase, and OKX still dominate in liquidity and order-book speed. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from DEXs, but can’t match CEXs on slippage-sensitive trades.

Nonetheless, the Magic Eden-Slingshot acquisition can significantly work towards reviving the declining interest in NFT trading.

With the NFT trading volume standing at mere $4.9 million, the total Q1 2025 trading volume has witnessed a 24% decrease from Q4 2024 (according to Coingecko Data). Last year in November, crypto trading platform Kraken also decided to shut down its Non-Fungible Token (NFT) marketplace.