Magic Eden is the largest NFT marketplace in the Solana ecosystem, and recently raised a war chest of funds that valued the young startup as a crypto unicorn.
Now we know how the firm is spending some of that cash: it has launched a gaming-centric investment arm.
Today, the firm revealed Magic Ventures, a venture investment arm that will focus specifically on Web3 gaming. To pursue that mission, the company has hired Tony Zhao—formerly of Chinese gaming giant Tencent—as its new head of gaming investments.
Zhao told Decrypt that Magic Ventures’ investments will be “purely strategic in nature” and provide support to developers of NFT-powered video games, rather than approach investments with the expectation of making a return on the funds.
“We're not thinking about returns—never have and never will,” said Zhao. “It's just to align our partnership together, right? We truly want to be the go-to partners for these developers.”
When Magic Ventures signs game developers, they’ll enter a Magic Eden ecosystem that offers a launchpad for primary sales of new NFTs, as well as the secondary marketplace for ongoing sales. The Solana-based marketplace currently commands 90% or more of Solana’s entire NFT market share. Zhao said that the goal is to help ease the entry of game makers into the Web3 ecosystem.
“Developers can focus on one thing that they know how to do, which is to build great games,” he explained. “We’ll help them to take care of all the Web3 elements and to help them onboard into the ecosystem.”
Zhao said that Magic Ventures has already made some investments with more on the way, but would not disclose which projects or startups it had invested in.
He added that there’s no fixed number in terms of total dollar amount that will be invested across projects and that the typical investment size is “pretty small” given the strategic nature.
