Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace that currently dominates the vast majority of the NFTs market on Solana, is preparing to expand to other blockchains.
The startup announced that it has raised $130 million in Series B funding as it plans to expand beyond the Solana ecosystem. Following this funding, Magic Eden – founded last September – is now valued at $1.6 billion.
Electric Capital and the Greylock jointly led this round of funding, and a new investor, Lightspeed Venture Partners, came in, along with old Paradigm and Sequoia Capital.
Three months ago the previous funding
Magic Eden just three months earlier had its first funding, Series A, where it raised $27 million. Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden, told Decrypt that his startup wasn’t planning to raise money so quickly again, but did so because of the growing market share it is gaining and its growing presence in NFT games:
“We didn’t want to feel like we had limited resources,” he explained, continuing: “and we wanted to build for the next 5 to 10 years.”
It will build on other blockchains as well
In addition to investing even more in the gaming industry – where it has a key rival in Fractal, an NFT gaming platform on Twitch co-founder Justin Kan’s Solana – Magic Eden plans to add support for NFT on other blockchain platforms.
“It’s really clear that we are – and will remain – in a multi-chain world,” explained COO and co-founder, Zhouxun Yin. He pointed out that certain types of NFT, such as games, artwork and music, are coalescing around certain blockchain platforms and that Magic Eden hopes to cater to them. However, he did not specify on which blockchain he plans to set up his marketplace.
NFTs and Solana
An NFT acts as proof of ownership and is often applied to digital goods such as artwork, profile photos, collectibles and video game items. Solana is currently the second most popular platform for NFTs after Ethereum in terms of trading volume.
The Solana ecosystem has shown remarkable signs of momentum in recent weeks, including several instances of NFTs projects in its ecosystem surpassing Ethereum projects in daily trading volume.
Lu noted the diversification of NFTs use cases on Solana, as well as a growing influx of Ethereum NFT traders starting to engage with the Solana ecosystem.
He also highlighted that the “meta” of Solana’s NFT trading changes frequently, as new trends appear every two weeks or so, and this keeps NFTs collectors committed to buying consistently.
90% of the secondary market
Magic Eden claims approximately 90% or more of Solana’s secondary market share of NFTs. Despite the hype, the addition last April of Solana’s support for OpenSea, the leading NFT market, does not appear to have had much impact.
This the Magic Eden co-founders believe is a positive sign for their own platform.
While the broader NFT market has fallen in recent weeks due to the cryptocurrency market decline and Solana (SOL) has lost about 60% of its USD value since the beginning of May, Lu pointed out that Magic Eden has had higher SOL trading volumes in recent weeks.
With Magic Eden looking forward to expanding to other blockchain platforms, its co-founders believe that the market has a real opportunity to dethrone the “more centralized/corporate”, as they describe it, OpenSea, as opposed to the more communal, DAO-assisted Magic Eden.
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