A newly-minted crypto unicorn is the top NFT platform on Solana. It has a valuation of $1.6 billion and plans to add more blockchains. Magic Eden is a NFT marketplace which currently controls the majority of the Solana industry. It is now looking to expand. Today, the startup announced it had raised $130 million in Series A funding. It plans to expand beyond Solana.
The Series B value Magic Eden, which was founded last September at $1.6 billion. This makes it the latest crypto unicorn with a value of at least $1 billion. Greylock and Electric Capital led the round. New investor Lightspeed Venture Partners joined previous investors Paradigm Capital and Sequoia Capital.
Magic Eden is just three months away from its last fundraise announcement, which was a $27million Series A round. Jack Lu, co-founder and CEO of Magic Eden, said that although the startup did not plan to raise funds again quickly, he was convinced by its growing market share and NFT gaming presence to create a war chest.
“We didn’t want to feel resource-constrained,” he explained, “and we wanted to build for the next five to 10 years.”
Extend your reach to other blockchains
Apart from pushing harder for its gaming vertical (which has , which is a key competitor in Fractal), Magic Eden plans to support NFTs on other platforms.
Zhouxun Yin, COO, stated that “it’s clear that we’re in–and will be in—-a multi-chain universe for a while.” He said that certain types of NFTs such as music, art, and games are forming around specific blockchain platforms. Magic Eden hopes to support them, but he wouldn’t specify which blockchains the marketplace will adopt.
An NFT is a proof that you own the digital goods. They can be used to purchase artwork, photos, collectibles and even video games. Solana is currently second in trading volume behind Ethereum.
In recent weeks, the Solana ecosystem has been showing notable momentum. There have been multiple instances in which a Solana NFT Project has topped all Ethereum projects in daily volume and even one day when all Solana NFT trading volumes exceeded that of Ethereum.
Lu pointed out the diversification of NFT use cases on Solana and the rising number of Ethereum NFT traders who are starting to get involved in Solana. He suggested that Solana’s NFT trading meta changes frequently, with new trends appearing every few weeks. This keeps NFT collectors interested and buying.
Magic Eden claims that it has a 90% or more share in the Solana NFT secondary markets. Despite all the hype, OpenSea’s addition to Solana support in May doesn’t seem to have had much impact. Magic Eden’s cofounders believe it was a positive move for the platform.
Yin stated that Solana and Ethereum have been “converging as a marketplace”, which he claimed they had long anticipated. He said that OpenSea’s and Rarible’s simultaneous additions of Solana NFTs to their respective platforms helped validate the space within the wider NFT community.
While the NFT market has been down for the past few weeks, and Solana (SOL has lost approximately 60% of its USD value since May), Lu stated that Magic Eden has experienced higher SOL transaction volumes over the last week.
With Magic Eden eyeing expansion to other blockchain platforms, the co-founders believe that the marketplace has a real shot at dethroning the “more centralized/corporate” OpenSea, as Yin described it, as opposed to its more community-centric, DAO-aided approach.
