Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, has partnered with gaming software firm Animoca Brands to launch a $200 million fund to invest in the metaverse.
As part of Binance Smart Chain’s $1 billion Growth Fund, each company will put forth $100 million to target early stage blockchain-based gaming projects on the BSC.
“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 Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director at Binance Smart Chain in a statement.
“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.
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Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands said that the investment aims to provide the necessities to early stage blockchain gaming projects to take them 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.”
The initiative comes amid the rise of the gaming and metaverse sector, and the fusion of blockchain technology and crypto. Of the top performing coins of 2021, many of them are gaming-related.
Blockchain gaming platform Gala is up roughly 39,000%. Virtual world The Sandbox (SAND) is up roughly 12,500%, and AXS, the native token on play-to-earn videogame Axie Infinity is up about 18,000% in the same time frame.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is priced at $48,000, currently up about 166% from where it was at the same time last year.
