TL;DR Breakdown
- Sequoia and Paradigm join Magic Eden’s $27 million round.
- The marketplace will allow users to trade different types of non-fungible tokens.
- The investment is part of Sequoia’s plans to expand its presence.
Magic Eden, an NFT marketplace, reveals a fundraising round of $27 million on Monday. Sequoia Capital led the Series-A round, with Paradigm and other Solana ventures to be introduced later. Eden’s marketplace operates on the Solana blockchain to verify non-fungible token transactions.
Magic Eden announced that it would use its resources to develop and launch an NFT mobile app and gaming vertical for on-the-go minting and trading of NFTs.
The site aims to help consumers trade assets on the blockchain more cost-effectively, allowing for greater asset liquidity. The company boasts that it is the most active NFT marketplace on the Solana network, having processed more than SOL 7.5 million transactions in the previous six months. In addition, the platform has over 90% dominance in the secondary market volume.
Magic Eden and its investors anxiously wait to see how OpenSea incorporates Solana. According to an article on Coding Forward by Jane Manchun Wong, OpenSea has already assessed the blockchain. OpenSea did not respond at the time.
Magic Eden rivals OpenSea
OpenSea has around 43% share of the market portion and $23.3 billion in total sales. It is a popular site to buy and sell NFTs according to reports and data analysis from DappRadar.
Nevertheless, Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, claims that OpenSea does not max out on efficiency since it operates on the Ethereum blockchain. Magic Eden may surpass OpenSea by being one of the first to market Solana NFTs.
OpenSea had a valuation of about $13 billion when it got acquired in January by investors, but Maguire thinks there’s a gap. The bet was to move quickly and seize the upper hand before OpenSea had a chance to enter Solana.
Apart from Sequoia Capital, the venture capitalists that may have put money into the fundraiser include Solana Ventures, Greylock, and Paradigm.
Growth continues in the world of Magic Eden
As a result of Magic Eden’s growth in popularity, NFTs on Solana have become increasingly popular. According to analysis and reports on DappRadar, the number of users has grown by 191% in the previous 30 days. This figure corresponds with around 200 thousand new users. On the other hand, the number of users on the biggest NFT platform, OpenSea, fell by 15% over the same period.
The NFT market had a chance to transform itself by concentrating on gaming NFTs, and it has swiftly outpaced its main competitor Solanart in terms of traffic to be the most popular NFT marketplace on Solana.
It also tried to put some distance itself and OpenSea by establishing MagicDAO, a DAO to accelerate platform evolution, reward supporters, and ultimately grow the project. Magic Eden shared 25k to 30k Magic Tickets to the community as NFT membership passes to the DAO.
