Binance Smart Chain, Animoca To Bet USD 200M On Crypto Gaming Startups
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has unveiled a USD 200m investment program developed in partnership with Animoca Brands, a company focused on non-fungible token (NFT) and gaming digital property rights – aiming to finance early-stage blockchain-based gaming startups.
BSC is a blockchain network built for running smart contract-based applications, launched by major crypto exchange Binance.
The funds will be allocated as part of the chain’s USD 1bn Growth Program, Animoca Brands said in a statement. BSC and its partner are each allocating up to USD 100m with the aim to accelerate shortlisted game ventures within “the multi-billion dollar crypto niche of GameFi” (‘gaming’ + ‘decentralized finance (DeFi)’).
The latest development comes amid expectations of the gaming industry boosting its worldwide sales in the coming years. The global gaming market was valued at USD 173.7bn in 2020, and it is forecast to reach as much as USD 314.4bn by 2026, according to a report by market research firm Mordor Intelligence.
With more than 2.1m daily active addresses reported in the past weeks, BSC has established itself as one of the major blockchain ecosystems. Games and play-to-earn opportunities on the chain have been responsible for a significant uptick in traffic and unique wallet interactions this year, according to the statement.
“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,” Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director at BSC, was quoted as saying.
She added that this investment will enable projects building on BSC to “get the opportunity to gain insights and expertise” from major gaming companies such as Animoca Brands, as well as “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,” Regina said.
BSC currently offers various crypto games to its users, including role-playing games (RPGs), strategy-battle arenas, sports, digital entertainment, adventure story based, logic, creative, as well as social games. Many of these projects have developed NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn models with the use of fungible tokens and/or NFT rewards.
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