From Magic Eden to Dicey: Jack Lu’s Next Move in Crypto

Jack Lu had already watched one frontier turn into a global market before he entered gambling.

Magic Eden began as a side project built at night by Lu and his co-founders. It caught fire inside the Solana ecosystem, became one of crypto's largest NFT marketplaces and, according to Lu, generated roughly $100 million in annual revenue at its peak.

Then the market beneath it collapsed.

Solana fell from about $250 to $8 during the first major downturn. Magic Eden's revenue dropped sharply, recovered during a later Bitcoin-led expansion, then declined again as the NFT market continued to contract. By 2026, Lu estimated that the business had fallen from roughly $100 million in 2024 revenue to around $1 million.

The figures were painful. Accepting what they meant was harder.

That moment became the beginning of Dicey, a crypto casino built by a team that understood digital communities and consumer products but had no previous experience operating a gambling platform.

The pivot required Lu to shrink a company that had once approached 200 employees to a core group of roughly 50, explain the new direction to investors and an NFT-native community, and learn the operational side of gambling while real players were already testing the product.

Three months after leaving beta, Lu said Dicey was averaging approximately $20 million in monthly deposits. The early traction matters, but it is not the part of the story he emphasizes most.

For Lu, the central question is whether the team can avoid repeating one of Magic Eden's hardest lessons: fighting over marginal market share instead of building something meaningfully different.

The instinct to choose the uncertain path

Lu was born in China and moved to Australia during primary school. His father was around 40 when the family moved and had to begin his career again in a new country.

Lu did not understand the significance of that choice as a child. In hindsight, he sees it as the source of an instinct that has shaped his own career: a willingness to choose uncertainty over a future that can be predicted too easily.

His childhood was otherwise ordinary. He played basketball, worked hard at school and spent long hours playing StarCraft. Online communities eventually led him into Bitcoin during the 2013 and 2014 market cycle.

Lu and Sid, a high school friend who would later become one of his co-founders, bought Bitcoin, Litecoin and early coins that have since disappeared. They also played some of the first crypto-native gambling products.

The games were simple, but the lesson stayed with him. Crypto was technically interesting and commercially uncertain. Gambling gave the coins an immediate use.

Lu's first attempt to join the industry did not happen immediately. Sid moved to the United States and started HelloBlock, a company that indexed the Bitcoin blockchain and sold access to the data through an API. Lu visited, reviewed the business and declined an invitation to join full time because he believed the market was too early and too narrow.

He returned to Australia, worked in consulting, moved into product management at a large technology company and continued trading crypto in the background. He describes turning Sid down as an early source of regret, partly because his friend had taken the uncertain path Lu admired.

Selling a feeling at Magic Eden

The opportunity that finally pulled Lu out of corporate technology was not a trading product. It was the rise of NFTs.

When NFTs began moving from pure financial speculation toward culture and community, Lu saw a product category that fit his background. Solana offered fast transactions. NFTs gave online communities an object around which they could gather, trade and speculate.

Magic Eden's early growth came through creators. Instead of acting only as a secondary marketplace, the team worked with creator-led projects on launches, auction structures, phased sales and custom release mechanics. Each creator brought a community with them.

The model worked quickly. Lu said Magic Eden reached approximately $100 million in annualized revenue during its first year.

But the marketplace remained attached to the health of the NFT cycle. When Solana fell from roughly $250 to $8, Magic Eden's revenue dropped by about 90 percent. The business recovered, then regressed again as interest in NFTs continued to fade.

The experience changed how Lu saw the behavior remaining on the platform during the worst periods.

The dream had been community and culture. The durable behavior underneath it looked increasingly like speculation.

Accepting that the market was not coming back

For much of 2024 and 2025, Lu still hoped the NFT market would recover. Magic Eden had survived previous downturns, and abandoning the category meant accepting that years of work would not return to their earlier scale.

The emotional break came before the operational one. Once Lu accepted the decline personally, the team began evaluating a new market. Around the time of SBC Lisbon in 2025, Lu and his co-founders studied the gambling industry more seriously.

The overlap was visible inside their own company. Many Magic Eden employees already gambled, and the team had experience building high-volume consumer products in crypto. Investors were willing to hear the thesis, and the company's history made the source of its capital visible to future players.

The transition ultimately became a complete restructuring, not an extension.

Magic Eden had reached close to 200 employees at its peak. The group that began the Dicey journey was closer to 50.

Lu described the process as painful but necessary. The smaller group was made up of people who had chosen the new direction rather than simply remaining inside the old company.

Once Dicey was already under development, Lu and the Magic Eden team opted for a harder pivot. The team paired the Dicey announcement with plans to wind down parts of its NFT infrastructure that were losing money.

Lu believes the split exposed a meaningful difference between the two audiences. Crypto traders often look for an edge and identify closely with the technology itself. Many casino players treat crypto as a payment rail for entertainment, accepting that luck and variance are central to the experience.

Once he made the decision, Lu no longer wanted a compromise.

Building in house after learning the cost of shortcuts

Like most casino operators Dicey uses external suppliers for its game catalog and sportsbook odds. But the team has built out more of the product layer, including its CRM, rewards engine and sportsbook interface.

The choice came partly from Magic Eden, where Lu believes the company relied too heavily on vendors.

The founding structure remained collaborative. Lu describes himself, business lead Zed and technical lead Sid as equal co-founders. None had experience operating an online casino when the work began.

That gap shaped Dicey's launch strategy. Instead of immediately spending heavily on acquisition, the company began with roughly 200 users drawn largely from the Magic Eden community, five original games and a deliberately basic product.

The first interface used an off-the-shelf theme and colors users mocked as gray-brown pastel. It was not intended to be impressive. It was intended to expose what the team did not yet know.

It did.

A player noticed that Dicey's blackjack game did not feel mathematically correct. The team investigated and discovered a logic error that prevented queens from being dealt. Lu said Dicey refunded the affected players.

Learning first, scaling second

The technical error was visible. The operational questions required a different response: observe the patterns, build the data and improve the system as new cases emerged.

Risk management became one of Dicey's first major learning areas. Bonus abuse, advantage play at live tables and sharp sports bets gave the team a growing set of patterns to study. Dicey combined guidance from experienced casino advisers with its own internal data, keeping growth deliberate and staged so each phase produced useful learning before the next.

Early on, new patterns surfaced almost every week, and the team worked to separate product issues from normal player behavior. Lu said that now happens closer to once a month. For him, that stabilization shows the learning process is working and gives Dicey more confidence to scale.

Lu applied the same learning-oriented approach personally by taking on VIP hosting, a role most founders would delegate.

The goal was to avoid an ivory-tower view of the business and understand both the player experience and the work expected of the team. In one case, a player he hosted did not feel the experience met the expected standard and stepped away for a period of time.

The player later returned, which Lu credits to the team's work and its willingness to improve the experience.

The experience reinforced how he thought about VIP service. The economics behind the role can be cold: expected value, player value, reward budgets and retention targets. The relationship itself is human, often anonymous and frequently tested only when something has gone wrong.

The product thesis behind Dicey

Lu's original thesis for Dicey had three broad parts: build trust in a market where players worry about payouts, compete through product in an industry dominated by marketing, and use crypto as more than a deposit method.

The first point is operational. Dicey's team is public, its financial backing can be traced to an established crypto business, and Lu repeatedly returns to the importance of treating withdrawals as a defining moment in the customer relationship.

The second is product differentiation. Lu believes many crypto casinos can succeed without looking meaningfully different because the gambling market is large and continuously replenished with new players. Marketing can compensate for familiar product design.

Dicey is taking the opposite bet. Its original games borrow mechanics from hyper-casual mobile games rather than repeating the standard crash, mines and dice catalog. One early example allows players to draw on screen to build a multiplier. Lu described future concepts influenced by games such as Fruit Ninja, where each successful action increases the potential payout until a losing object appears.

The third part of the thesis is crypto-native loan or borrowing technology. Lu wants to explore ways for players to use tokenized stocks, gold or collectibles as collateral without selling the underlying asset first. In that model, Dicey would extend betting power against the collateral.

It is an early idea rather than a released product, and it introduces obvious risk and regulatory questions. But it illustrates how Lu distinguishes crypto infrastructure from simply accepting cryptocurrency.

Personalizing rewards without rewarding abuse

Rewards are another area where Dicey wants to depart from the standard model. Most casinos assign players to tiers based primarily on wagering volume. Lu argues that volume alone can treat fundamentally different users as if they create the same value.

Growing without buying the market

At the time of the interview, Lu said Dicey was averaging around $20 million in deposits each month, approximately three months after leaving beta.

The company had reached that point with limited conventional marketing. Non-VIP acquisition came mainly through organic social content. VIP growth relied on outreach, affiliates and agents. Dicey had some creator relationships but had not competed aggressively for large streamer deals in a saturated market.

That restraint is partly strategic and partly defensive. Lu does not want to scale acquisition faster than the operation can learn from new situations. The company is still improving its sportsbook, rewards systems, data quality and customer experience.

Trust, fun, and fairness

Lu summarizes Dicey's long-term product direction through three words: trust, fun and fairness.

Trust means paying players without creating unnecessary friction at the point when the relationship matters most. Fun means producing games and experiences that do not feel copied from the same supplier catalog. Fairness means exploring ways to make the casino's activity more transparent and reduce the feeling that every product is built around the player losing to an invisible house.

One long-term concept is publishing transaction activity on-chain at sufficient scale, allowing outsiders to audit deposits, payouts and game activity. Lu recognizes that previous attempts to put entire casinos on-chain often used blockchain technology without solving a real problem. He believes selective transparency could be more useful once there is enough activity to audit.

Dicey is also studying models in which users can provide capital to lottery-style products and receive part of the house edge. The intention is to make the relationship feel less strictly like player against casino.

Building different after Magic Eden

Lu is careful not to predict that product innovation alone will make Dicey one of the largest crypto casinos. The industry already contains well-funded operators, with strong acquisition channels and products that have improved through years of iteration.

His ambition is instead framed around a process: stay close to players, keep the operation controlled and give new ideas enough time to prove whether they deserve to exist.

That history is the reason Dicey's slogan, 'built different,' carries more weight internally than a normal marketing line. It is a response to a business that succeeded spectacularly, fought to preserve that success and then discovered that the market itself had moved on.

Magic Eden taught him how quickly a consumer product can catch fire. The NFT market’s  decline taught him that a company can spend years defending a category after the behavior underneath it has changed.

Dicey is the attempt to act on that lesson sooner.

Closing note

Magic Eden's market fall left Jack Lu with a decision founders often delay: keep defending the business that had made the company successful, or accept that the market had changed and begin again.

His shorthand for the decision is simple: "Hard choices, easy life; easy choices, hard life. At some point, you have to rip the Band-Aid off."

Dicey is the result of that choice and another zero-to-one journey for a smaller team. This time, it is operating in a market where product mistakes affect real balances and trust is tested at withdrawal.

The NFT market collapse forced the pivot. Dicey will be judged by whether the team can turn that hard choice into a product players believe is genuinely different.