The story of Magic Eden is one of legend
In less than a year’s time, Magic Eden has become a unicorn. What does that mean? A company that reached $1 billion in value without being put on the stock market, is called a unicorn, meaning it simply shouldn’t be possible but they did it. Magic Eden has surpassed that value with a current value of $1.6 Billion in less than a year. The new value of Magic Eden comes after the latest fundraising round and the company is on the move to hire more staff at the time of this writing.
Magic Eden accounts for 90% of all NFT volume on the Solana blockchain and has announced that they have raised an additional $130 million to reach that $1.6 billion valuation. According to a source on Bloomberg, this would mark a 3x increase in their value from three months ago, quite astonishing seeing as though recently there has been a more pessimistic outlook on NFT and crypto. Gemini and Coinbase have been reported to lower their workforce numbers but Magic Eden has plans to increase theirs.
The price of Solana has recently hit a low that is 80% lower than its ATH yet Magic Eden co-founder Jack Lu states that transactions on the platform have not slowed down a bit. In May there was an intake of $7.5 million in revenue with the company having aspirations of $100 million in revenue per year. The platform is poised to use its funds to expand and support creators of NFTs.
Former Coinbase Product Manager and current COO of Magic Eden Zhuoxin Yin spoke on the future aspirations of the platform to provide support for other blockchains as well. Currently, the biggest competitor to Magic Eden is Opensea with a current value of $13.3 billion. Opensea supports multiple chains to Magic Eden’s one. With the current success of Magic Eden the possibilities are there for the company to overtake Opensea one day if their plans for multi-chain come to fruition, but the road will be long.
Many users joined the Solana community for the low gas fees and speed of transactions. With the changes being implemented on Solana, one of them being an actual increase in fees, another being the possibility for gas wars, there is also the possibility that Magic Eden may lose out to Opensea which already controls a commanding amount of the NFT market in total.
This does not diminish the absolutely great job the team at Magic Eden has done with very humble beginnings. The team has hit 20m SOL in total trading volume stating they make their collectors and creators the MVP. The 100-strong team focuses on community and feedback to create an experience like no other. There is a reason Magic Eden is a unicorn and why they will continue to shine in this web3 space. The co-founder and CTO of the company went on Twitter to express his gratitude as well.
It was a very heartfelt response to the growth of the company and the team completed their celebrations with a bash on a yacht in New York during NFT.NYC.