Magic Eden raises $130M, hitting unicorn status at $1.6B valuation – TechCrunch

NFT marketplace Magic Eden, launched just nine months ago, has raised $130 million in a Series B round co-led by Electric Capital and Greylock Partners, bringing its valuation to $1.6 billion.

Lightspeed Venture Partners also participated alongside previous investors Paradigm and Sequoia Capital. The round comes just three months after it closed a $27 million Series A in March.

“[This valuation] more than ever validates the industry and market we’re in,” Zhuoxun Yin, COO of Magic Eden, said to TechCrunch. “There’s investor appetite to bet on this market. We’re very bullish on the horizon, there’s a lot to build and most of the use cases are still early, so this gives us an opportunity to build that.”

Its primary NFT marketplace, Launchpad, has over 250 projects, while its secondary marketplace has over 7,000 collections and is responsible for 92% of all Solana-based NFT volume. In general, Magic Eden’s platform has an average of 20 million unique sessions per month and mints over 50,000 Solana-based NFTs daily.

“When we started, we weren’t the first movers on Solana. We had to play catch-up,” Yin said. “So this didn’t fall in our laps; we built on the community’s wants and did what they wanted to do and I think it served us well and is something we’ll continue to focus on.”

The funds will be used to expand its primary and secondary marketplaces, look into multi-chain opportunities beyond the Solana blockchain, and improve its products, among other things.

“At our heart, we are user-first and want to go where they are and better serve them,” Jack Lu, CEO of Magic Eden, said to TechCrunch. “I think when you think about different use cases in crypto overall, right now it’s clear NFTs are a bridge from the average consumer to the blockchain world. It’s cultural, it’s about communities on the internet and is much more emotionally relatable.”

This past year, there has been exponential growth in the NFT sector as the digital asset subsector took off in popularity both in the crypto world and among mainstream audiences. But the hype stagnated a bit after NFT buyers and sellers peaked in January and have since fallen from all-time highs, Dune Analytics data shows.

With that said, over the past three months, the monthly active users and transaction volume across all aggregated Solana NFT transactions have increased consecutively, according to Dune Analytics data from chuxin.

As of June 1, Magic Eden makes up for almost 97% of the market share for daily Solana NFT transactions, up almost 10 percentage points from 88.5% on the month-ago date, chuxin’s data shows.

“It has been a fast and wild ride,” Lu said. “There was a huge amount of [NFT] growth in the last cycle, but this is nothing compared to the headroom and growth potential in the future.”