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Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace that currently captures the vast majority of the Solana market, is gearing up for expansion. Today, the startup announced that it has raised $130 million in Series B funding, with plans to expand beyond the Solana ecosystem.
The Series B values Magic Eden — which was founded last September for $1.6 billion. This makes it the latest crypto “unicorn” to have a valuation of $1 billion or more. Electric Capital and Greylock co-led the round, which also saw new investor Lightspeed Venture Partners participate, along with previous investors Paradigm and Sequoia Capital.
Magic Eden is only three months away from its final fundraising announcement: a $27 million Series A round revealed in March. Jack Lu, CEO and Co-Founder of Magic Eden decrypt That the startup didn’t plan to raise funds again so soon, but said its growing market share and growing NFT gaming presence convinced it to build a battle chest.
“We didn’t want to feel short of resources,” he explained, “and we wanted to build for the next five to 10 years.”
In addition to putting even more emphasis on its gaming vertical—which has a major rival in Fractal, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan—a Solana NFT gaming platform from Magic Eden is also planning to add support for NFTs to other blockchain platforms. .
“It’s really clear that we’re in and we’ll be in a multi-chain world for a while,” explained COO and co-founder Zhouxun Yin. He suggested that certain types of NFTs, such as games, artwork and music, are converging around certain blockchain platforms and Magic Eden hopes to serve them, but would not specify any blockchains that would be expected to be adopted in the market. plan is.
An NFT acts like a proof of ownership, and they are often applied to digital goods such as artwork, profile pictures, 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 notable signs of momentum in recent weeks, with several instances of the Solana NFT project topping all Ethereum projects in daily trading volume, and even a day in which all Solana combined. NFT trading volume tops Ethereum.
Lu pointed to the diversification of use cases for NFTs on Solana, as well as the increasing influx of Ethereum NFT traders starting to dabble in the Solana space. He also suggested that Solana’s NFT trading “meta” changes frequently, with new trends appearing every two weeks and keeping NFT collectors engaged and buying.
Magic Eden claims a share of around 90% or more in the Solana NFT secondary market. Despite the hype, the addition of Solana support in April to major NFT marketplace OpenC hasn’t made much of an impact. If anything, the co-founders of Magic Eden think it was a positive for the platform.
Yin said he sees the Solana and Ethereum profile picture collections “converging as one market,” which he said has been anticipating for a long time. He added that OpenSea and Rarible both connect Solana NFT at the same time, which helped validate the space in the wider NFT community.
While the broader NFT market is down in recent weeks due to the crypto market crash, and Solana (SOL) has lost nearly 60% of its USD value since the beginning of May, Lu said that Magic Eden has hit a recent high. Have seen SOL transaction volume. Week.
As described by Yin, with Magic Eden expanding to other blockchain platforms, the co-founders believe the market has a real shot at differentiating the “more centralized/corporate” OpenC as Its more community-focused, in contrast to DAO-aided. the vision.
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