Quick take:
- The funding was closed via a token sale.
- BreederDAO aims to deliver more blockchain game NFTs to meet demand.
- The company is breeding game assets for Axie Infinity, Sipher, Cyball and Crabada.
Philippines-based NFT asset manufacturer for play-to-earn games, BreederDAO, has just closed a $10 million series A funding via a token sale.
The funding was co-led by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Delphi Digital. Participants include Hashed, com2us, Morningstar Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Sfermion, The LAO, Emfarsis and others.
BreederDAO is founded by a young team that formed in Oct 2021. The company’s CTO, Nico Odulio, was an early advisor to Yield Guild Games (YGG), a Philippines-based gaming guild that rents out in-game NFTs to players who don’t have the capital for the upfront cost of buying NFTs to play the games. Last August, YGG raised a $4.6 million funding led by a16z.
One of the pioneering blockchain games, Axie Infinity, exploded in the Philippines during Covid lockdown as people in the country have discovered they could earn more in two weeks from playing blockchain games than what they would earn in a month at their regular jobs.
Currently, more than 40% of Axie Infinity players are from the Philippines. This gives Philippines-based blockchain game startups an advantage in capturing the blockchain game digital asset production market share.
Recognising the demand for play-to-earn scholarships – programmes that rent out blockchain game digital assets – BreederDAO aims to scale up the production of these assets to address the asset requirements of gaming guilds and scholarships. The company is currently breeding play-to-earn game NFTs for Axie Infinity, Sipher, Cyball and Crabada.
According to Arianna Simpson, general partner at a16z specialising in web3 investments, guilds such as YGG were formed to sponsor players through revenue-sharing “scholarships.” Guilds rent their NFTs to players, or “scholars,” so more people can play and earn.
However, scholarships represent only a small percentage of the game’s daily active users for one reason: “There’s a BIG bottleneck between player demand and supply of in-game assets. That’s exactly the problem BreederDAO aims to solve. If YGG addresses the player on-ramp, then BreederDAO is easing asset supply,” she tweeted.
She goes on to say that people can lend their assets to BreederDAO’s pools to earn staking rewards, and earn shares of proceeds when new assets are purchased by guilds or on the open market.
Since its launch, BreederDAO has supplied more than 100,000 NFTs, partnered with over 50 guilds and eight games. An AI-powered asset production and fully automated AI factory are in the pipeline in its Q3 and Q4 roadmap.
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