Quick take:
- Justin Kan’s Fractal has raised $35M in a Seed round.
- The Twitch Co-founder’s gaming and NFTs platform received backing from Paradigm and Multicoin Capital.
- Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, and Position Ventures also participated in the round.
Justin Kan has announced the successful completion of a $35 million funding round for his NFTs and blockchain gaming startup Fractal. The fundraising was led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital.
Other participants in the round included leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Yat Siu’s Animoca Brands, “Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, Tim Ferriss, the founders of Ramp, and many more.”
The Twitch Co-Founder had initially announced his unique gaming NFT marketplace at the end of 2021, emphasising the commitment to revolutionise Web3 gaming.
Fractal will use the new funds to expand its development team including bringing in more engineers, as well as, growing its community. As part of the backing, Paradigm’s Matt Huang will be joining the company’s board.
Fractal operates as a marketplace for gaming NFTs. It recently launched an NFT launchpad, enabling companies to offer their initial NFT collections to the public. Its gaming marketplace is one of the most strict when it comes to listing gaming NFTs.
According to data provided by Fractal, it only accepts approximately 5% of all gaming project applications to its launchpad. Some of the notable games to be accepted on the launchpad include “real-time strategy games (House of Sparta), multi-mode games (Tiny Colony), racing games (Yaku), and MMORPGs (Cinder and Nekoverse).”
Commenting on the latest fundraising, Justin Kan, Co-Founder of Fractal highlighted its commitment to building a trust layer in the Web3 gaming ecosystem, which will play a crucial role in bringing more gamers to blockchain gaming.
Kan highlighted a growing concern within the NFT industry of unfulfilled promises as developers continue to launch low-quality projects in pursuit of financial gain.
“We are working with the best AAA gaming studios with large communities to bring the coolest game experiences to players. The transition to blockchain assets is a new business model for gaming, and in 10 years will be an even bigger shift in the gaming world than Twitch was,” Kan said.
Fractal is looking to onboard the next 100 million crypto users through blockchain games.
On the other hand, Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm pointed to the inevitable paradigm shift in the gaming industry as players continue to seek more involvement in the ecosystem.
“Justin and the Fractal team understand this shift better than anyone else, and we’re excited to invest in their vision to better serve players.”
Mable Jiang, partner at Multicoin Capital echoed Huang’s remarks saying that Fractal is playing a crucial role in the gaming industry by helping to create “truly open, decentralized economies.”
“Just like free-to-play games launched a new business model for gaming over a decade ago, we believe that blockchain will enable a paradigm shift to the models for games of the future.”
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