The boat was 24 feet long, a detail Sidney Zhang makes a point of correcting. When a podcast host called it a houseboat, Zhang interrupted: it was a small sailing boat, moored at Alameda Marina. His first crypto company had run out of money. For a short stretch in the middle of the 2010s, that boat was where he stayed. The owner, Nate, would later turn up as a colleague at Magic Eden. Startups have a way of making even the punch line wait a few years.
By the time Magic Eden raised $130 million at a $1.6 billion valuation in June 2022, it was tempting to read Zhang’s earlier ventures as a tidy preface. They were messier than that. He had built Bitcoin products for consumers, watched interest flare and disappear, tried selling tools to other developers, and finally left crypto for a conventional engineering job. The route back ran through food delivery, self-driving research, artificial intelligence and a friend he had met on the way to math tutoring in Melbourne.
A bus stop in Melbourne
Zhang arrived in Australia from China at 15. His parents continued working in China while he lived in a house they owned in Glen Waverley, a Melbourne suburb he still described as home years later. The independence gave him room for hobbies. He taught himself to program. At school, he met Jack Lu through a math tutoring class; one account places their first meeting at a bus stop on the way there. Neither boy could have known that this ordinary errand would eventually become part of a company origin story.
He did not follow a straight academic line into engineering. Zhang began degrees in law, international relations and accounting before finishing a finance degree and later studying computer science at Georgia Tech. He declined a job at Macquarie Capital and went to San Francisco in 2013. His parents, he recalled, thought the choice was “insane.” When he arrived, he knew few people and emailed startup chief executives en masse looking for work. That is an unromantic way to begin a Silicon Valley adventure, which is one reason it rings true.
Products that lasted a day
The early Bitcoin world appealed to Zhang’s appetite for both code and consumer behavior. He helped organize a San Francisco Bitcoin developer meetup and contributed to libraries other builders used. Yet he wanted people outside developer circles to have a reason to try the technology. One project tipped people in Bitcoin on Twitter. Another put a wallet in a browser extension, years before browser wallets became familiar furniture of crypto. Zhang later remembered closing it because he could not see how it would become a business.
Then came LoveBlock, a way to place the trace of a love letter on Bitcoin’s blockchain. It enjoyed a Valentine’s Day burst and faded almost immediately. The name was sweet; the retention curve was less affectionate. These projects were tests of a question Zhang kept asking: what would make someone use crypto for its own sake? Attention alone was an unreliable answer. Some experiments reached the front page of Hacker News and then vanished from use a few days later.
He changed his approach. If his team could not find the right consumer product, perhaps other developers could, given an API. That was the premise behind HelloBlock, the Bitcoin developer startup he co-founded. It attracted users and some funding, but the developers using it could not build businesses that paid for the service. Zhang’s account of the failure is unusually plain: the customers could not pay because their own customers were missing. He borrowed money from his then girlfriend, now his wife, and eventually spent time on the Alameda sailboat.
“Opportunities come every once in a blue moon.”Sidney Zhang, discussing the timing of Magic Eden
In 2015, he took a break from crypto and joined Uber Eats while it was still being built. The move gave him a different kind of education. At Uber Eats he worked on machine learning for ranking, recommendations, search and discovery: all the machinery that helps a customer find something appealing in a crowded catalogue. He later moved to Uber’s Advanced Technologies Group, where his work turned toward computer vision and prediction, then joined Facebook’s AI organization. The subject matter changed. The practical problem of making complex systems usable did not.
The old conversation resumes
Zhang kept watching crypto. He said he would return when there was a consumer opportunity compelling enough to pull him back. NFTs, with their mix of ownership, collecting and communities, finally did it. The market’s actual shape surprised him; it looked little like what he had imagined in 2013. That surprise was an advantage. He was looking at behavior already happening, rather than asking people to adopt a clever idea simply because it was clever.
Jack Lu, by then working in crypto, contacted his old Melbourne friend about building an NFT marketplace on Solana. Zhang knew Zhuojie Zhou from Uber; Zhuoxun Yin brought product and crypto experience. Four founders, with different histories and overlapping networks, began working on the idea while they still had day jobs. They used pseudonyms at first. Their early work included scraping contract addresses and onboarding collections. A ready-made WordPress theme helped them get a working product in front of users.
Zhang says the first product followed about ten days of coding. The marketplace went live in September 2021, into a Solana NFT market with established competitors. It was a quick entrance, but speed did not make the work simple. Solana’s developer tools were young enough that an opaque error could send the team into the underlying code. Zhang has credited people elsewhere in the ecosystem for helping them through those early problems. His reason for choosing the chain was direct: a consumer marketplace needed transactions that felt fast and inexpensive.
In the first month, the marketplace listed about 200 collections. Its advantage came partly from reducing the wait between a collection’s initial mint and its appearance for resale. In a market where people traded quickly, those minutes mattered. The team also built tools for creators, including Launchpad. By June 2022, a new funding round valued the company at $1.6 billion. It was a striking figure for a business less than a year old, and a snapshot of a buoyant, volatile market rather than a permanent measurement of worth.
The daily work behind the number
Zhang’s account of Magic Eden’s rise is less cinematic than the valuation. He talks about replying to users, fixing failures and repeating small tasks until they earn trust. The company’s early momentum came with visible mistakes, including outages and a troubled Launchpad project that forced a review of its screening process. Fast growth made errors public. The founders answered users, issued refunds in that case and paused part of the launch service while changing its checks. A marketplace can publish code quickly; it cannot demand confidence as quickly.
Inside the engineering team, Zhang described small squads assembled around goals, sometimes reshaped month by month. The idea was to let designers and engineers make decisions without waiting for a long chain of approvals. He put the burden on judgment and repair: ship what seems right, then correct it when reality disagrees. He has said he looks for heart and talent over a long résumé. There is room in that philosophy for a strong engineer who has not yet collected the familiar job titles.
The long return / selected chapters
Bitcoin experiments → Uber and Facebook AI → Magic Eden. Bar lengths are visual markers, not a measure of company value.
The contrast with his first crypto startup is instructive. HelloBlock supplied infrastructure to builders still searching for paying users. Magic Eden entered a world where collectors and creators had already gathered, and where a better experience could win their attention. Zhang brought consumer search experience from Uber Eats and technical management experience from larger organizations, but also a memory of what happens when a product is admired and rarely used. Those years on either side of the sailboat belong in the same story.
A map with more than one home
Magic Eden began with Solana NFTs and later expanded its products and the chains it supports. Its own description now speaks of collectibles, games, token trading, a wallet and tools for creating and trading digital assets. Zhang remains identified among the company’s founders and as its CTO. The business around him has changed shape more than once, which seems fitting for someone whose career began with several ideas that proved too early or too small.
In 2022, he spoke about returning to Australia whenever he could and imagined the possibility of a company with a stronger second center in Asia or Australia. Glen Waverley, the San Francisco startup scene, the Alameda marina and the Melbourne math class all sit on this map. The remarkable link is not destiny. It is the patience of a conversation with an old friend, plus years spent finding out what customers actually do when the novelty wears off.
The sailboat makes a good opening because it is vivid. It is also easy to let it stand for too much. What followed was a series of jobs, experiments and decisions, each adding a tool Zhang could use later. When he returned to crypto, he was not starting from zero. He knew how an elegant idea could fail, how a large consumer service works, and how quickly people judge a marketplace by the one transaction that goes wrong. Magic Eden was his second act in crypto. The first one still shows in the way he talks about building it.