Solana Labs, Coinbase Ventures Among Investors to Pour $35 Million in ‘Fractal’ NFT Platform

Four months since its launch, Fractal NFT platform has already gathered itself a backing by noted venture capital firms. In a fresh funding round, the NFT platform from Twitch co-founder Justin Kan has raised $35 million (roughly Rs. 264 crore). Paradigm and Multicoin Capital led the round with Coinbase Ventures, Solana Labs, and Andreessen Horowitz emerging as fellow investors. Launched in December last year, the Fractal NFT marketplace sells gaming-centric Solana-based NFTs for peer-to-peer trading.

Announcing the development, Fractal said it will use the seed funding towards its intensions of becoming a marketplace for gamers to discover, sell, and purchase gaming NFTs or non-fungible tokens.

“When we launched Twitch, we decided that Fractal would focus on being the best friend to blockchain gaming studios. We've seen an abundance of interest in the mints we've launched. Every mint that we've launched has sold out. Our mint with Tiny Colony sold over $2 million (roughly Rs. 15 crore) of NFTs,” Kan said in a blog post.

The Twitch co-founder has predicted that minting digital assets and taking royalty of those assets when they trade will become a lucrative business model in the future.

“We believe that blockchain represents a new, participatory business model for gaming, one that is better for both gamers and game developers. We will see the biggest games become open economies that support other developers building businesses on top of,” Kan added.

Fractal vouches to provide gaming enthusiasts with true ownership of authentic NFTs so that they retain or grow in value as time passes.

“We think games are how the next 100 million users get onboarded into crypto. With this new capital, we'll be focused on building out our engineering team and making the best product possible for gaming companies who want to build around blockchain and turn their games into truly open economies,” Kan added.

There has been a major buzz surrounding the future of virtual gaming in recent times.

The blockchain gaming industry grew by 765 percent in 2021, a Forbes report claimed in January this year.

A DappRadar report had recently said that a whopping 804,000 unique active players connected to blockchain-based games in July 2021.

Gaming companies are ramping efforts to match pace with the growing Web 3 industry.

Earlier this week, PUBG developer Krafton struck a deal with Solana Labs, stirring up rumours about its potential plans to add crypto and NFT elements to its games.