Sequoia Capital Invests in Solana-Based NFT Marketplace Magic Eden

While the leading NFT marketplace OpenSea continues to reign supreme in terms of NFT trading volume, Sequoia Capital is putting its weight behind a relatively lesser-known Solana-based NFT marketplace.

Sequoia Capital Bets on Magic Eden

OpenSea, the Ethereum-based NFT marketplace is inarguably the most popular NFT marketplace in existence today. To date, OpenSea has facilitated NFT trades worth more than billions of dollars in cumulative value.

Specifically, OpenSea currently commands over 43 percent of the NFT market with over $23.3 billion in total sales, data from research firm DappRadar indicates.

However, the road hasn’t been devoid of bumps for OpenSea.

Despite finding itself in a series of controversies — ranging from user dissatisfaction towards the platform to firing their product manager who was found to be engaging in insider trading of NFTs for personal monetary gains – OpenSea continues to dominate the NFT market by being the de-facto NFT trading platform for new users in the space.

While users continue to flock to OpenSea as their gateway to the NFT landscape, seasoned venture capital firm Sequoia Capital is putting its weight behind OpenSea’s potential future competitor, Magic Eden.

The primary research behind Sequoia putting its money on Magic Eden is said to be the fact that it is built on a more efficient blockchain Solana compared to OpenSea’s Ethereum.

Official Announcement Coming Soon

Magic Eden is expected to announce a $27 million round of funding from Sequoia and a range of other veteran investors in the digital assets space. Although the company declined to disclose its valuation, expert estimate it’s certainly lower than OpenSea’s valuation of $13 billion it received from investors in January.

Shaun Maguire, a partner at Sequoia Capital, says:

“The bet was that they would move fast and that they would capture that advantage before OpenSea would be able to go into Solana.”

It’s also worthy of note that the lead investor in Magic Eden’s funding round is essentially hedging its bet. Paradigm, the crypto-focused venture capital firm that is also a major backer of OpenSea.

Magic Eden stakeholders and community is waiting to see whether, or when, OpenSea moves to Solana. Notably, the leading NFT marketplace has already conducted tests on the Solana blockchain. With OpenSea launching on Solana, we could see the earlier Solana-based NFT marketplaces such as Magic Eden, and Solanart lose a considerable market share to the new and more popular entrant.

Although Solana offers affordable transactions that cost cents compared to Ethereum’s notorious high-cost transactions, the former has thus far been unable to make any significant inroads in the NFT space.

Solana’s leading NFT marketplace Magic Eden is only the ninth-largest NFT marketplace across all the blockchains. At present, Solana is primarily being used for DeFi applications.

Zhuoxun Yin, a co-founder of Magic Eden says Solana’s advantage over Ethereum will play well in a medium like video games, where NFTs are likely to be traded frequently.

Yin said:

“Gaming NFTs will be on places like Solana. They’re not going to be on Ethereum.”