The announcement came on April 1, but it was no joke. Neither was the amount raised, $35 million USD, a tidy sum. Justin Kan dropped a hint of what was ahead for Fractal last month, tweeting, “Yeah, I built Twitch, it has millions of users & gaming NFTs are way bigger.”
Ten days before the NFT Marketplace launched on December 30 last year, Fractal announced the launch, and by the time it went live, the Fractal Discord had racked up some 107,000 subscribers, according to Kan in an interview with GamesBeat.
Paradigm and Multicoin Lead $35M Seed Round
Along with Menlo Park, California-based Andreeson Horowitz, Solana Ventures, Coinbase, Animoca Brands, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, Tim Ferriss, and the founders of Ramp along with many others joined the round.
Kan, however, took to Twitter to remind stakeholders in the Fractal and NFT community, as well as any startup entrepreneurs looking for this, “it’s not your seed size, it’s what do you do with it.” With the crypto market booming with echoes of the NASDAQ in the late 1990s, this is an important warning for crypto investors and startups.
Here’s what Kan says Fractal has in the works with the fresh infusion of private capital raised three months from launching:
“Crypto never sleeps. We’re building things very quickly, very product-driven, it feels like we’re re-defining how value is going to be created on the internet. So, if you haven’t been following, Fractal is a marketplace for people to buy and sell and discover gaming NFTs. We’ve been working hard on it for the past three months. It went pretty well. We’ve worked with many game partners to drop out of print NFT collections, and we have a ton more in the pipeline…”
A press release from Fractal Friday specifies further:
“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.”
He predicts that over the next decade, blockchain assets will enable a bigger shift in online gaming than the rollout of the Twitch platform. Kan has set an ambitious goal of onboarding some 100 million cryptocurrency users by powering his NFT Marketplace for blockchain-supported digital gaming assets.
Will Solana-powered Fractal Make as Big a Splash in NFTs as OpenSea?
Fractal is powered by the Solana blockchain, a third-generation blockchain that utilizes proof of stake (POS) to qualify nodes to validate and secure actions on the network. That allows it a high degree of scalability and the ability to handle a large volume of transactions in a trustless peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Its proprietary PoS method is dubbed proof of history (PoH) by Solana.
Protocol’s Tomio Geron reported on Friday that Solana’s lightning-fast blockchain platform needed a killer app to break into the mainstream, speculating that Fractal’s NFT Marketplace could be that app. The key to success in this business is quality. VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi reported on Friday that Kan says Fractal carefully reviews applications for Web3 games, and currently has an acceptance rate of just 5% of applications to have their tokens traded on its NFT clearinghouse.
Some notable games currently listing NFTs on Fractal include House of Sparta (real-time strategy), Tiny Colony (multimode), Yaku (racing), and Cinder and Nekoverse (MMO RPG).
