Fractal, a new marketplace for gaming NFTs founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, declared today that a $35 million seed round led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca, Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, Tim Ferriss, Ramp founders, Matt Huang of Paradigm will join the company’s board of directors.
This funding round comes two months after the public launch of Fractal on December 30th, 2021. The additional funds will be used to hire more engineers, recruit and support game developers, and build a vital ecosystem of GameFi participants.
Fractal is a marketplace where gamers can discover, buy, and sell gaming NFTs. Fractal recently launched Fractal Launchpad, a new product that assists game developers in selling their initial NFT collections to the general public.
Fractal evaluates web3 games for quality and accepts only 5% of applications to Fractal Launchpad. Real-time strategy games (House of Sparta), multi-mode games (Tiny Colony), racing games (Yaku), and MMORPGs have all debuted on the Fractal launchpad (Cinder and Nekoverse).
Every Fractal-launched game has sold out their NFT collection, with Tiny Colony raising over $2 million from their initial sale. For a single game NFT collection release, peak traffic reached over 33,000 buyers.
“Fractal is establishing a trust layer in the web3 gaming ecosystem,” said Fractal Co-Founder Justin Kan. “Right now, NFT marketplaces are still the wild west, with many teams failing to deliver on their promises.”
We collaborate with the best AAA gaming studios with large communities to bring players the most exciting game experiences. The transition to blockchain assets is a new business model for gaming that will be an even bigger shift in the gaming world than Twitch was in the last ten years. Through blockchain games, Fractal hopes to attract the next 100 million crypto users.”
Bill Karamouzis, CEO of Addicting Games stated that”Game companies want to list on a marketplace that focuses on and supports the gaming community, the gaming studio responsible for the blockchain game ev.io. “
Selling digital, in-game assets has grown into a massive industry in recent years, with blockbusters like FIFA and Fortnite raking in tens of billions of dollars from digital sales. Today, an increasing number of games are listing their virtual items on public blockchains, giving players complete control over those assets and allowing them to own and resell them in the future. Gaming NFTs are the fastest growing type of NFT, with over 1 million active crypto wallets holding gaming NFTs last month.
Mable Jiang, partner at Multicoin Capital, said that “The Fractal team is supporting games that create truly open, decentralised economies,”. He further continoued “Just as free-to-play games pioneered a new business model for gaming over a decade ago, we believe blockchain will enable a paradigm shift to future game models.”
Read more:
Celebrities backed Bored Bunny NFT cost investors $20.7 million loss
