Magic Eden, the largest nonfungible token marketplace for the Solana blockchain by market share, today announced that it has raised $130 million in new funding to expand its operations.

Electric Capital and Greylock co-led the Series B round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Paradigm and Sequoia Capital also participating. The funding also raised the company’s valuation to $1.6 billion since its last round in March, which makes it the latest crypto “unicorn.”

Magic Eden launched in September 2021 with the goal of defining the future of nonfungible tokens by providing a place for creators to introduce creators and users to the assets. NFTs use blockchain technology to represent the ownership of virtual items such as digital art, collectibles, videogame items and music.

Since its inception, Magic Eden’s platform has become the leading platform for Solana NFTs, receiving an average of 22 million sessions per month and more than 44,000 NFTs traded daily. Launchpad is a platform that allows creators to “launch” their collections and has been successful in supporting the creation and launch of more than 250 projects to date.

“We know that NFTs are the best way to bring people onto the blockchain,” said Jack Lu, chief executive and co-founder of Magic Eden. “NFTs are exciting social and cultural experiences that bring connectivity to the world. Since our inception, we’ve made the conscious decision to support both our creators and users through this tremendous era of growth for both the company and the industry. The best part is that we’re just getting started.”

The company added that it intends to expand further into gaming NFTs. Nonfungible tokens are instrumental for providing the ability for game players to have true ownership of virtual items in multiplayer and metaverse games. The marketplace currently has NFTs from over 35 blockchain-based games, reaching more than 430,000 active users. The games featured on Magic Eden’s website include “Everseed,” “Genopets,” “Blockstars” and more.

“At Magic Eden, we take pride in building innovative products that are taken from our passionate community,” said Zhuoxun Yin, chief operating officer and co-founder of Magic Eden. “We were the first to innovate in a number of areas, such as pairing NFT minting capabilities via Launchpad with a secondary marketplace and embedding gameplay with NFT games directly on the platform.”

With this new funding, Magic Eden intends to branch out from Solana and build its marketplace to support other blockchains. The company has not given any details on which other blockchains the company intends to support. The dominant blockchain for NFTs by the numbers is Ethereum, followed by Dapper Labs’ Flow, Wax and Polygon, so it’s most likely these chains will be somewhere on that list.

The funding round for Magic Eden comes at a time that crypto markets, and global tech stocks more broadly, are in a downturn. Most recently, NFT markets lost 23% of their market value on average in mid-June during what is dubbed the beginning of a “crypto winter.” The Solana blockchain itself has also suffered multiple outages during 2022 hurting its token value.

However, the team and investors said they aren’t worried about the downturn. Between the funding and the planned integrations, they believe that the company has everything it needs to maintain momentum.

“A downturn, especially when the company is as well-capitalized as Magic Eden and that has been generating real significant cash flows, is actually a pretty great position to acquire that talent and just build through it,” says Greylock partner Mike Duboe told Forbes.

Image: Magic Eden