Blockchain gaming unicorn Animoca Brands announced yesterday a partnership with Aquis Farm — a major racehorse-breeding business owned by Hong Kong’s billionaire Fung family — to bring equestrian activities into the metaverse. The blockchain specialist will leverage Aquis Farm’s equestrian intellectual properties to develop blockchain games and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Fast facts
- “Aquis recognises the inevitability of the growth of a digital and decentralised world and will be at its forefront to leverage the equestrian and other forthcoming opportunities of the metaverse,” Aquis Farm CEO Justin Fung said in a written statement.
- Hong Kong-based Animoca and Aquis Farm will follow the hoofprints of the likes of NFT-based digital horse-racing game ZED RUN, where users breed and race horses through the Ethereum scaler Polygon. ZED RUN, a Sydney-based company that recently announced that its virtual headquarters is in Decentraland, is currently among the top 20 highest selling NFT of all-time, with over 44,000 unique buyers investing close to US$124 million, according to NFT data aggregator CryptoSlam.
- “Going to the race track [or] going to a sports event does have a lot of appeal, but people are starting to see the convenience of staying in their home or on their mobile,” Yohann Calpu, CryptoSlam’s chief blockchain officer, told Forkast.News.
- According to a recent Chainalysis report, more than US$26.9 billion worth of value was sent to two of Ethereum’s NFT smart contracts, ERC-721 and ERC-1155 — the two types associated with NFT marketplaces and collections — from January to October this year.
- Ethereum currently leads all blockchains in historical NFT sales volume, at over US$12.7 billion. OpenSea is the most popular NFT marketplace, with over $16 billion worth of cryptocurrency received in its all smart contract addresses on Ethereum and Polygon so far in 2021, according to Chainalysis.
