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Sidney Zhang’s Road Back to Crypto Ran Through a Sailboat
He spent his first crypto years building products that vanished almost as quickly as they appeared. After a detour through Uber Eats and Facebook AI, an old friend from Melbourne brought him back to build Magic Eden.
Zhuojie Zhou and the Art of Building Before the Crowd Arrives
Magic Eden took roughly ten days to launch. Its co-founder and chief engineer, known as Rex, had spent years learning how to make complicated systems move quickly without losing their footing.
Jack Lu and the Art of Starting Over
The Magic Eden co-founder built a marketplace in two weeks, watched it reach a billion-dollar valuation, then faced a harder task: admitting the market had changed.
Clinton Bembry’s Second Exit Was Built on Making Crypto Feel Boring
First Astro Wallet sold to Coinbase. Then Slingshot sold to Magic Eden. Across both companies, Clinton Bembry has pursued the same unfashionable idea: crypto works better when users do not have to think about crypto.
Slingshot
Slingshot is a San Francisco-based crypto trading app that lets people buy, sell, and swap hundreds of thousands of tokens across multiple blockchains from a single USDC balance - hiding the usual friction of wallets, bridges, and gas fees behind a clean consumer interface. Founded in 2020 by Coinbase alum Clinton Bembry, it raised roughly $18M through a Ribbit Capital-led Series A and was acquired by NFT marketplace Magic Eden in April 2025.