Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has joined hands with Animoca Brands — a Hong Kong-based blockchain gaming, metaverse and non-fungible token (NFT) company — to launch a US$200 million investment program to accelerate and incubate early crypto gaming startups built on BSC, according to a company statement released Monday.
Fast facts
- Specifically, the duo are co-investing up to US$100 million each to boost the development of GameFi projects.
- Animoca Brands has invested in over 100 NFT-related projects, including Axie Infinity, OpenSea and Dapper Lab — the creator of CryptoKitties and NBA Top Shot. The company’s blockchain game projects include REVV Racing, F1 Delta Time, MotoGP Ignition as well as The Sandbox. In October, Animoca Brands closed a capital raise for US$65 million at a pre-money valuation of US$2.2 billion.
- “Early GameFi projects require funding to build their products, and need industry expertise for open-world gameplay and tokenomics, as well as networking opportunities to establish growth in the blockchain gaming and open metaverse,” Yat Siu, executive chairman and co-founder of Animoca Brands, said in the statement.
- Interest in gaming decentralized applications (dApps) on BSC increased exponentially in the third quarter of this year, with over 1,700% more unique active wallets (UAWs) interacting with games than in the previous quarter, according to DappRadar.
- “Gaming is one of the strong pillars of Web 2.0, reaching billions of users. Its large-scale real life use case makes it one of the core focus areas for crypto’s mass adoption to onboard retail consumers into the Web 3.0 world,” Gwendolyn Regina, investment director at Binance Smart Chain, said in the statement.
See related article: Binance Smart Chain one year on — from DeFi to NFTs and gaming