Buterin’s Mother-Led USD 100M Genesi DAC Picks Crypto Gaming Platform as Its First Investment

Fredrik Vold
Last updated: | 3 min read
Source: Adobe/Natallia

 

Genesi DAC, a group of venture capital investors led by Vitalik Buterin’s mother Natalia Ameline, picked the crypto gaming platform Tristan Metaverse as its first investment, with more projects expected to be announced soon.

The investment, which was for an undisclosed amount, will go towards development of blockchain-based games on Tristan Metaverse’s platform, with the first game set to launch “towards the end of this month,” according to Natalia Ameline.

“We are very dedicated to growing the community,” she told Cryptonews.com.

Genesi, which controls a USD 100m fund and is organized as a DAO-like decentralized autonomous company (DAC), is “just starting out,” Ameline said, adding that “it’s not all going to be invested and deployed right away.” For the right projects, however, “money is not an issue,” the Genesi DAC manager said.

“We are looking for high-quality, high-potential projects from a wide range of blockchain sectors, including decentralized finance (DeFi), decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), NFT, gaming, metaverse, infrastructure, launchpad, and more,” Ameline told Cryptonews.com.

She added that teams that apply for funding should have “a proven track record, focus and skill set,” and that innovative approaches with scaling potential are especially interesting.

According to her, the significance of Tristan as a gaming platform is that it also offers a way for people who are not necessarily crypto users and don’t have a crypto wallet, to join in on games.

“You will just need a dapp [decentralized application] link that can be shared in a Telegram channel or a Discord community channel, and you can just click the link and join in to play the game,” Ameline said, with the announcement further adding that it expects this will “pave the way for massive Web 3 adoption.”

Asked about future projects for her new investor consortium, Ameline said the DAC has an investment committee responsible to selecting investments, and that there are “quite a few” projects in the pipeline. The ones that pass a vote by the committee will then be passed along to the general members of the DAC, who on an individual basis can consider making an investment.

Among the members of the DAC is Metis Labs, the developers behind the new Metis Optimistic Rollup scaling solution for the Ethereum (ETH) network. As reported, Vitalik Buterin claims that rollups are the way to go when it comes to the network’s scaling issue. 

According to Ameline, Metis has seen “extraordinary growth” following the launch of its mainnet in November last year, with the total value locked (TVL) on the platform growing consistently between December last year and January.

As of Monday, Metis’ TVL stood at USD 251m, dropping from over USD 335m last Friday as the market corrected sharply over the weekend, data from Defi Llama showed.

The Ethereum layer-2 solution is currently working to decrease the cost of transactions on the network further, Ameline said, explaining that the team expects the cost to drop “from two to three dollars” today, to “cents” in the near future.

“We want to make sure our platform is harboring not just DeFi projects, but also gaming and metaverse projects,” Ameline said. 

She added that lower transaction fees are particularly important in gaming because there are “a lot of transactions being generated.”

Commenting on the investment by Genesi members, Tristan Metaverse CEO Frank L said that their focus is “to make crypto gaming mainstream” by lowering the barriers of entry for new users. He added that the team is also planning a “light cloud wallet” for the Metis Optimistic Rollup solution.
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Learn more:
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Ethereum is Halfway Towards its ‘Grand Vision’ – Vitalik Buterin
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(Updated on January 25 at 07:58 UTC with additional details about potential investment targets for Genesi DAC.)