Magic Eden began as a Solana NFT marketplace about a year ago and quickly rose to prominence. The $1.6 billion startup adopted Ethereum, the world's largest NFT ecosystem, in August and is now expanding again, this time to Polygon.

Magic Eden announced today that it will support NFT assets generated on Polygon, an Ethereum sidechain scaling network. Polygon transactions are significantly faster and cheaper than those on the Ethereum mainnet, making it an excellent choice for projects requiring large amounts of digital assets.

According to Magic Eden's COO and co-founder Zhuoxun Yin, who told Decrypt: increased adoption by major Web2 brands and the potential for Web3 gaming on a large scale through the platform.

The market announcement comes after a string of major brand announcements centered on Polygon. Reddit, for example, has used Polygon for its collectible avatars, and users have created more than 3 million wallets to store them.

Meta recently partnered with Polygon to allow Instagram creators to print their own NFTs directly from the app, Starbucks is collaborating with Polygon to build a loyalty rewards program, and Nike is building a digital apparel platform on top of that. Polygon has quickly established itself as the platform of choice for large-scale Web2 brands looking to expand into the Web3 space.

Magic Eden, on the other hand, sees Polygon as a great promising platform for NFT-based video games. Polygon is used for some NFT assets in Metaverse games such as Decentraland and The Sandbox, and a number of new projects are being built on the platform. Magic Eden's main focus is gaming, and Yin stated that the company is counting on Polygon to boost this space.

"We're looking forward to high-quality Polygon games being available online next year, and we're excited to bring them to market in ways we've never done before," Yin told Decrypt. "We are in the early stages of blockchain gaming mass adoption and are excited to collaborate with Polygon to bring an exciting new wave of Web3 gaming to market."

Several game developers, including BORA, Intella X, nWay, Block Games, Boomland, Planet Mojo, and Taunt Battleworld, have expressed interest in printing their projects through Magic Eden's marketplace. Polygon's assets are expected to be integrated into the market by the end of the year.

An NFT is a blockchain token that represents the ownership of a single item, such as artwork, collectibles, profile pictures (PFPs), and interactive in-game items. Throughout 2021, the NFT market has increased its activity, generating a volume of operations of 25,000 million dollars by the end of the year.

Magic Eden dominated Solana's space for the most part, though it briefly lost significant market share in September and October when its startup competitors refused creative royalties, resulting in cheaper transactions for merchants. Magic Eden then followed in the footsteps of many of its competitors by making creative royalties optional for merchants, quickly reclaiming 90% or more of Solana's market share.