NFT Marketplace Magic Eden Secures $27M Series A

Magic Eden, a Solana-based NFT marketplace, announced a $27 million Series A funding round on Monday. The round was led by Paradigm with participation from Sequoia Capital, Electric Capital, Greylock Partners, Kindred Capital, Variant Fund and Solana Ventures.

The raise will go toward staff expansion, future partnerships and product development.

Jack Lu, CEO and co-founder of Magic Eden, told Blockworks that the funding will “help [them] expand as a company, including hiring the best talent, improving [their] product and infrastructure and investing in community initiatives.”

Among those initiatives is MagicDAO, a recent attempt to launch a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) gated by the startup’s NFT (non-fungible token) collection Magic Ticket. The project airdropped 30,602 such tickets, which provide access to the group’s Discord channels, to community members and plans to involve those members in governance decisions in the future.

Magic Eden has recorded over $736 million in total trading volume since its launch last year — establishing itself as the largest Solana marketplace, according to data dashboard DappRadar.

Trading volumes for Magic Eden, however, have declined 85.76% to roughly $41 million in the past month — mirroring the performance of the broader NFT market.

The NFT marketplace OpenSea’s trading and transaction volumes fell as well, declining 22.4% and 11.61% respectively over the past month. OpenSea, unlike Magic Eden, auctions off NFTs on Ethereum and Polygon.

Paradigm, which launched a $2.5 billion crypto fund last November, is an investor in OpenSea as well.Benjamin Cohen, managing partner of crypto fund Web 3 Equities, previously told Blockworks when a market is as fast as OpenSea, it is “fair to assume that [it] will experience large swings and corrections.”

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