Blockchains have an almost infinite range of applications. Far from the classic DeFi applications, Magic Labs (formerly Fortmatic) is developing a decentralized identity solution. An innovation that seems to interest, as the company has just successfully completed a round of financing.
A strongly supported fundraising
A little more than a year after its first round of financing, which allowed it to raise $4 million, Magic Labs has repeated the feat, via a Series A financing led by the London-based venture capital firm Northzone.
In total, this action raised $27 million from a diverse group of investors. We find several investment funds, such as Tiger Global, Volt Capital, the Digital Currency Group, CoinFund and Placeholder. However, 80 business angels also participated in the funding round, such as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, or former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan, to name a few.
According to information provided by Magic Labs CEO Sean Li, the funds raised will allow the company to double its payroll. In addition to the 30 current employees, 30 new recruits should be hired in the coming months.
Passwordless logins on the menu
Launched in 2018, Fortmatic is a project that aims to leverage the benefits of blockchain to provide a decentralized identity solution, allowing users to log in to various applications without using a password.
After its name change in May 2020, Magic Labs released a software development kit (SDK) for developers, allowing them to easily integrate the company’s proposed solution with just a few lines of code.
In practice, the Magic platform allows users of a site to use a variety of password-free login methods, such as Magic links, “social login” or WebAuthn. As a result, users no longer need to have a wallet extension or password to access their favorite applications.
“We’re securing millions of user identities, with rapid growth by the week.”
Sean Li
To date, many sites and applications use Magic Labs’ authentication system. These include Polymarket, Showtime, Nifty’s, Async Art and DEX giant Uniswap.
Obviously, Magic Labs is not the only company to explore decentralized identity solutions. Indeed, since 2019, the giant Microsoft is developing a similar solution called ION, hosted on the Bitcoin network. We had to wait until March 2021 to finally see version 1 of this solution deployed on a large scale.
