The Magic Eden NFT market launched a gaming venture branch and it doubled down on the web3 gaming space so let’s read more in our latest Blockchain news.

The Magic Eden NFT market is the top marketplace on Solana and it launched a web3 gaming investment branch. Magic Ventures aims to make investments and onboard developers into the Web3 space via the NFT market’s infrastrcuture. Magic Eden is the biggest NFT market in the Solana ecosystem and raised a war chest of funds that valued the young startup as a unicorn. The company will be spending some of the cash by launching a gaming-centric investment branch.

The company revealed Magic Centuries is an investment branch that will focus on web3 gaming and in order to pursue this mission, the company hired Tony Zhao from the Tencent gaming division as the new head of gaming investments. Zhao said that the Magic Ventuers’ investments will be strategic in nature and will provide support for the NFT developers and the developers of video games rather than approach investment with the expectation of making a return on the funds:

“We’re not thinking about returns—never have and never will. 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 will enter a Magic Eden ecosystem that offers a launchpad for the primary sales of new NFTs as well as on the secondary markets for the sales. The Solana-based market now commands 90% or more of the entire NFT market share and Zhao said that the goal is to help ease the entry of new game creators into the Web3 space:

“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 already made investments with more on the way but didn’t disclose which projects or startups it invested in. He added that there’s no fixed number in terms of the total dollar amount which will be invested and there will not be a typical investment size given the strategic nature:

“We’re not here to fund the entire development [of games]. Our value-add is not capital—it’s all of these infrastructure solutions and an NFT experience that no one else in the market can provide.”