Gaming NFT marketplace Fractal, founded by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan has raised a massive $35 million in its seed funding round. The funding round was led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital. The previous funding round in January was led by Goat Capital.
The funding round saw investments from big names such as Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca, Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, Tim Ferriss, the founders of Ramp, and many more.
“Fractal is building a trust layer in the web3 gaming ecosystem. NFT marketplaces are still the wild west right now, with many teams failing to deliver on their promises. We are working with the best AAA gaming studios with large communities to bring the coolest game experiences to players.” said Justin Kan.
Fractal was launched to the public in December 2021 and allows gamers to buy, sell, and discover gaming NFTs. Fractal also recently launched a Fractal Launchpad which helps companies sell their NFT collections to the public.
Fractal Launchpad has an acceptance rate of only 5% and thoroughly vets a game before launching its NFT collection.
“We’re in the middle of a generational shift in gaming, powered by crypto, where players expect a greater degree of ownership and control of their digital items,” said Huang, co-founder and managing partner at Paradigm.
Huang, who will also be joining Fractal’s board, continued “Justin and the Fractal team understand this shift better than anyone else, and we’re excited to invest in their vision to better serve players.”
Fractal Launchpad has till date launched real time strategy games (House of Sparta), multi-mode games (Tiny Colony), racing games (Yaku), and MMORPGs (Cinder and Nekoverse). Every game has sold out its collection till date.
“The transition to blockchain assets is a new business model for gaming, and in 10 years will be an even bigger shift in the gaming world than Twitch was. Fractal hopes to onboard the next 100 million crypto users through blockchain games” Kan continued.
Justin Kan tweeted that the funds raised in this round will be used to expand their team by hiring more engineers, recruiting and supporting game developers and growing a vibrant ecosystem of GameFi participants. He also announced the drop of 20+ mints.
Fractal’s journey, however, hasn’t always been the smoothest. The startup’s 100,000 participant strong discord channel was hacked back in December and more than 300 users ended up losing a total of $150,000.
