Animoca Brands Corporation Ltd and Binance Smart Chain with its $1 billion Growth Program have launched a $200 million investment program to accelerate and incubate early crypto gaming start-ups that are building on Binance Smart Chain (BSC) infrastructure.
Animoca Brands and BSC’s Growth Program will co-invest up to $100 million each, which will then be used to accelerate the development of short-listed game projects in the multi-billion-dollar crypto niche of GameFi.
Taking blockchain mainstream
“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,” Animoca Brands executive chair and co-founder Yat Sui said.
“This investment program will provide these necessities to the projects that we think have the potential to take blockchain mainstream.”
Animoca Brands is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain and gamification that is driving digital property rights via NFTs and gaming to help build the open metaverse.
It develops and publishes a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token, original games and products utilising hundreds of popular intellectual properties.
Its subsidiaries include The Sandbox, Blowfish Studios, Quidd, GAMEE, nWay, Bondly, Lympo and various others.
The company has a large portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships, including investments in more than 100 of the most promising NFT-related companies and projects such as Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Bitski, Harmony, Alien Worlds and Star Atlas.
Building next-gen scalable blockchains
“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,” said Binance Smart Chain investment director Gwendolyn Regina.
“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,” she added.
BSC is one of the largest blockchain ecosystems with more than 2.1 million daily active addresses in the past few weeks. The company’s Ethereum-based infrastructure enables decentralised trading, the building of decentralised applications (dApps), interoperability between other blockchains, and support of smart contracts and other DeFi products.
In 2021, games and play-to-earn opportunities on BSC have experienced a significant uptick in traffic and unique wallet interactions.
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-based gaming projects have developed NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn models with fungible tokens and/or NFT rewards. The company believes these GameFi projects have the potential to emerge as metaverses with their own inbuilt economy.