NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Raises $130M for Creator, Collector Support

key takeaways

Funds will be used to expand its primary and secondary marketplace and explore multi-chain opportunities
The marketplace receives an average of 22 million unique sessions per month and sees over 40,000 NFTs traded daily

Magic Eden, the top Solana NFT marketplace, announced a $130 million series B funding round Tuesday, bringing its valuation to $1.6 billion.

Electric Capital and Greylock co-led the round, and Lightspeed Venture Partners joined as a new anchor investor. Previous investors Paradigm and Sequoia Capital participated as well.

Funds will be used to expand the company’s primary and secondary marketplaces to fully support the NFT (non-fungible token) creator and collector journey, Magic Eden told Blockworks.

The primary marketplace, the Magic Eden Launchpad, is a dedicated service for Solana creators that has launched over 250 projects to date.

“We want to be there every step of the way of the long creator journey: pre-mint, launch, post-mint. We have always known our creators deeply, and we intend to develop other tools across operations, marketing and tech support,” Magic Eden CEO Jack Lu said.

As for the company’s secondary marketplace, which accounts for 92% of the Solana NFT market share, the plan is to explore multi-chain opportunities, invest in the team, and enhance the user experience with improved insights, analytics and trading tools.

Additionally, the company intends to double down on its nascent forays into NFT gaming after launching the Eden Games platform earlier this year. Believing that the “future is ultimately cross chain,” it will also use funds to explore multi-chain opportunities to attract new users and projects.

Regardless of market movement, Magic Eden is building on a 10-year time horizon. “Magic Eden’s goal is to define the future of NFTs by supporting the next generation of digital creators and introducing the next billion users to Web3,” Lu said.

“We know that NFTs are the on-ramp into blockchain,” added Lu, and the most successful collections “pique people’s curiosity not because they’re simply an NFT, but because the value that the NFT represents entices new user acquisition — whether it’s token gated content, access…community-based projects, or artistic value.”

Magic Eden’s cumulative volume was at 19,901,672 solana at the time of writing. The marketplace’s most popular NFT collections in terms of trading volume in the past seven days are Primates, Okay Bears and Yeah Tigers.

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