Solana NFT Marketplace Magic Eden raises $ 130 million, plans to expand more chains

by James · July 5, 2022

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In short

Magic Eden, the leading Solana-based NFT marketplace, has raised $ 130 million worth $ 1.6 billion.
The marketplace plans to expand beyond Solana to include other platforms as well.

Magic Edenone NFT marketplace that currently controls the vast majority of Solana market, preparing for expansion. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $ 130 million in Series B funding with plans to expand outside the Solana ecosystem.

Series B values Magic Eden – which was founded in September last year – at 1.6 billion dollars. That makes it the latest crypto “unicorn” with a value of $ 1 billion or more. Electric Capital and Greylock led the round together, with the new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners also participating with former investors Paradigm and Sequoia Capital.

Magic Eden is just three months removed from its latest fundraising announcement: a $ 27 million Series A series round revealed in March. Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden, told Decrypt that the startup did not plan to raise money again so quickly, but said that its growing market share and growing NFT game presence convinced him to build a war chest.

“We did not want to feel limited in resources,” he explained, “and we wanted to build for the next five to ten years.”

Expands to other blockchains

Beyond pushing even harder on the game vertical – which has a central rival in Fractala Solana NFT gaming platform from Twitch co-founder Justin Kan — Magic Eden also plans to add support for NFTs on other blockchain platforms.

“It’s quite clear that we’re in – and we want to be in – a multi-chain world for a while,” explained COO and co-founder Zhouxun Yin. He suggested that some types of NFTs, such as games, artwork and music, be gathered around certain blockchain platforms and that Magic Eden hopes to serve them, but would not specify any blockchains that the market plans to use.

An NFT acts as a proof of ownership, and they are often used on digital goods such as works of art, profile pictures, collectibles and video game objects. Solana is currently the second most popular platform for NFTs behind Ethereum in terms of trading volume.

The Solana ecosystem has shown remarkable signs of momentum in recent weeks, such as several instances of a Solana NFT project tops all Ethereum projects in daily trading volume, and even a single day where all combined Solana NFT trading volume topped Ethereums.

Lu pointed to the diversification of use cases for NFTs at Solana, plus an increasing influx of Ethereum NFT traders starting to frolic in the Solana area. He also suggested that Solana’s NTA trade “meta” changes frequently, with new trends emerging every two weeks and keeping NFT collectors engaged and buying.

Magic Eden claims a share of about 90% or more of the Solana NFT secondary market. Despite the hype, the leading general NFT marketplace is OpenSea addition of Solana support April does not seem to have had much of an impact. If anything, Magic Eden’s co-founders thought it was positive for the platform.

Yin said they have seen Solana and Ethereum’s profile picture collections “converge as a market”, something he said they have long expected. He added that having both OpenSea and Rarible added to Solana NFTs at the same time helped to validate the place in the wider NFT community.

While the broader NFT market has been down in recent weeks due to the crash in the crypto market, and Solana (SOL) has lost around 60% of the USD value since the beginning of May, Lu said that Magic Eden has seen higher SOL transaction volumes in recent the years weeks.

With Magic Eden looking to expand into other blockchain platforms, co-founders believe the marketplace has a real chance to abolish the “more centralized / corporate” OpenSea, as Yin described it, as opposed to the more. community-centered, DAO-supported approach.