A new $200 million joint investment initiative by Binance and Animoca Brands will “accelerate and incubate early crypto gaming startups that are building on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).”
In a blog post published on December 6, Binance announced that the $1 billion Growth Fund for Binance Smart Chain in October (in order to accelerate adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology is going to use $100 million to “accelerate shortlisted game projects in the multi-billion dollar crypto niche of GameFi.” The other $100 million of the $200 million figure mentioned above comes from Animoca Brands, which is a “leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification.”
Animoca Brands, which was founded in January 2014 by Yat Siu and David Kim, and its various subsidiaries “develop and publish a broad portfolio of blockchain games, traditional games, and other products, many of which are based on popular global brands, such as Formula 1®, Disney, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP™, and Doraemon. Animoca Brands is also a prolific investor with over 100 investments in NFT-related blockchain companies, including Sky Mavis (Axie Infinity), Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), OpenSea, Harmony, Bitski, and Alien Worlds.”
Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director at Binance Smart Chain, had this to say:
“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.
“With this co-investment, projects building on BSC will get the opportunity to gain insights and expertise from leading gaming giants such as Animoca Brands, along with collaboration opportunities with blockchain experts from the BSC Community. We look forward to working together with GameFi projects to build next-gen scalable blockchains and onboard the next one billion new users into crypto.”
The blog post also mentioned that BSC currently “bolsters an ecosystem of crypto games including RPGs, strategy-battle arenas, sports, digital entertainment, adventure story based, logic, creative, and social games.” The majority of BSC-powered based gaming projects have “developed NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn models with fungible tokens and/or NFT rewards.” Such GameFi projects could “emerge as metaverses with their own inbuilt economy.”
Yat Siu, the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands, stated:
“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. This investment program will provide these necessities to the projects that we think have the potential to take blockchain mainstream.“
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