Why Lightspeed joined Magic Eden’s $130 million Series B round
Lightspeed has been investing in blockchain companies since 2013. We’re in it for the long haul. And we know the strongest crews are forged during times of duress. That’s one of the reasons why we’re happy to join Electric Capital and Greylock in a $130 million Series B round for Magic Eden, the leading platform for creating, discovering, and collecting NFTs on the Solana blockchain. By enabling people to own and trade digital assets, NFTs represent a fundamental building block of the next-generation web and the future of interactive digital experiences.
Magic Eden is the fastest-growing platform for users looking to create, discover, and collect NFTs. The marketplace receives an average of 22 million unique sessions per month and sees over 40,000 NFTs traded daily. In May 2022, it surpassed its much larger competitors, becoming the number 1 marketplace by volume. ME aims to help introduce the next 100 million users to the ecosystem by working closely with creators, collections, game developers, and more. Founded with a “Creators and Community-First” principle in mind, Magic Eden is leading the frontier for next-generation web3 applications adoption across the masses.
Why we are investing
Community First: Despite market volatility in the broader crypto ecosystem, ME has seen a steady upward climb in the number of users engaging on the platform, continually setting new highs for user metrics. It isn’t every day you see an NFT marketplace extending beyond crypto-native “whales” to mainstream audiences who appreciate the culture, interaction, and content. The Magic Eden community is shaping into one of the strongest centers of all NFT-related activities.
The relationship between Magic Eden and its users/members is built on trust formed over time. On top of the outpouring of love and support for the platform, ME also receives constant feedback and feature requests from its community. It’s not uncommon to see co-founder and CTO Sid Zhang respond to a feature request late at night, and then see that feature go live on the platform a few weeks later.
They Always Ship: Every month, ME publishes an update around shipped features (the April edition can be found here). From bulk bidding/purchasing, to top community upvotes, to collection floor price tracking, the engineering and development team at Magic Eden has demonstrated exceptional ability to drive innovation and create a feature-rich experience in a rapidly evolving NFT market. Transparency and short feedback loops are core values to the incredibly hard-working team at ME. We believe the next leading community-focused creator ecosystem should be equipped with such quality so that it can adapt and attract the next 100 million users to web3. In addition to the growing popularity of its destination website, Magic Eden is expanding its partnerships with other important ecosystem players. Its suite of embedded marketplace APIs empower projects to host their own secondary transactions.
The Next Frontier: Through its focus on creating a low-barrier of entry and fast execution environment, Magic Eden has set itself up to spearhead category expansion beyond profile pics (PfPs) and into gaming, sports, arts, and other frontiers. Since introducing its games discovery portal, ME has launched 57 games and metaverse projects. Eden Games now handles more than 90% of all gaming NFT volume traded on Solana. The platform caters equally to game developers as to players and aims to form the bridge to embed blockchain technology to traditional as well as crypto-native games. The company also recently partnered up with Overtime to bring the NCAA March Madness experience onto web3.
Exploring brave new web3 worlds
We are big believers in the potential of NFTs as an enabling technology for digital ownership in the web3 economy. Ultimately, blockchain has the power to underwrite a diverse set of use case scenarios for applications in the future. Magic Eden team’s laser focus on creators and accessibility will enhance its ability to innovate around arts, games, and sports, and so many more categories, helping to define new frontiers of consumer adoption in the web3 ecosystem.
Written by Shan Shan and Mercedes Bent
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