Binance Smart Chain in collaboration with Animoca Brands has launched a $200 million investment program to accelerate and incubate early crypto gaming startups. Both companies are co-investing up to $100 million each. The money will be deployed to speed up game projects in GameFi, a multi-billion dollar crypto niche.
Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director, Binance Smart Chain (BSC), acknowledged gaming as 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,” she said. “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.”
BSC, as per the statement, currently bolsters an ecosystem of crypto games including RPGs, strategy-battle arenas, sports, digital entertainment, adventure story-based, logic, creative and social games. It should be noted that the majority of BSC-based gaming projects have developed NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn models with fungible tokens and NFT rewards.
Yat Siu, Executive Chairman and Co-Founder, Animoca Brands, believes early GameFi projects require funding to build their products. “It needs industry expertise for open-world gameplay and tokenomics, as well as networking opportunities to establish growth in the blockchain gaming and open metaverse,” Siu said. “This investment program will provide these necessities to the projects that we think have the potential to make blockchain mainstream.”
Animoca Brands is known for developing and publishing a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token. Its original games include The Sandbox; Crazy Kings; and Crazy Defense Heroes; and products utilizing hundreds of popular intellectual properties including Formula 1, Disney, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP, and Doraemon.
