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.”

Get the day’s top cryp­to news and insights deliv­ered to your inbox every evening. Sub­scribe to Block­works’ free newslet­ter now.