The Metaplex Foundation, developer of an NFT protocol behind 5.7M+ minted Solana NFTs, raises $46M with Michael Jordan and Allen Iverson among 90+ investors
Andrew Hayward / Decrypt :
Context & Ripple Effects
Athlete-backed NFT capital has a clear lineage here: Michael Jordan was among the pro athletes in Dapper Labs' $305M NBA Top Shot raise in March 2021, and he now reappears in the Metaplex round — but on the other side of the chain divide. Where Dapper built a closed marketplace on its own Flow chain, Metaplex is the open minting protocol underneath 5.7M+ Solana NFTs, an ecosystem seeded by Solana Labs' $314M private token sale led by a16z and Polychain.
The bet is infrastructure rather than storefront: Metaplex supplies the standard that marketplaces like Magic Eden — which raised a $27M Series A weeks after this round to push into gaming — build their volume on. The round extends the pattern of sports cards and collectibles money (Alt's $31M Series A drew Kevin Durant's Thirty Five Ventures) moving up the stack from trading platforms into protocol layers.
First-order effects
- Metaplex gains a 90+-investor war chest to harden the default minting standard for Solana NFTs, while star names like Jordan and Iverson give it consumer credibility no pure-crypto investor could buy.
Second-order effects
- Dapper Labs now faces a funded open-protocol rival on a cheaper chain, pressuring its walled-garden NBA Top Shot model; Magic Eden and other Solana marketplaces get deeper liquidity in the standards layer they depend on.
Third-order effects
- If athlete-branded rounds keep landing at both the marketplace and protocol layers, NFT infrastructure consolidates into chain-specific stacks — Flow-style closed platforms versus Solana/Ethereum open protocols — with celebrity capital deciding which side scales.
The trend: Sports-star capital is becoming a recurring funding instrument for NFT companies, and it is increasingly backing open blockchain infrastructure over closed consumer marketplaces.