Fractal, a new marketplace for gaming NFTs founded by Justin Kan, the co-founder of Twitch, today announced a $35M seed round led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital with with participation from 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.
Paradigm’s Matt Huang will be joining the company’s board. This financing round comes two months after launching Fractal to the public on December 30th, 2021. The new funds will be used to hire more engineers, recruit and support game developers, and grow a vibrant ecosystem of GameFi participants.
Paradigm and Multicoin Capital led the round with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca, Coinbase, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, and Tim Ferriss.
Paradigm’s Matt Huang will be joining the company’s board. This financing round comes two months after launching Fractal to the public on December 30, 2021. The new funds will be used to hire more engineers, recruit and support game developers, and grow a vibrant ecosystem of GameFi participants.
Fractal vets web 3 games for quality, accepting only 5% of applications to Fractal Launchpad, Kan said. Games that have launched on the Fractal launchpad include real-time strategy games (House of Sparta), multi-mode games (Tiny Colony), racing games (Yaku), and massively multiplayer online role-playing games (Cinder and Nekoverse).
If NFT gaming on an upstart blockchain sounds wild, Kan is known for taking a zany idea and turning it into a big business. In 2007, he co-founded Y Combinator startup Justin.tv, his self-named livestreaming site, which eventually turned into Twitch.
Despite the issues with bridges and other obstacles, it’s gotten easier for consumers to use Solana through tools like the Phantom wallet, Kan said.
Fractal, which launched in late December and has raised $35 million in seed funding led by Paradigm and Multicoin Capital, vets the games and then partners with games that agree to have their NFTs trade on Fractal by marketing games to gamers, through its Discord (100,000 members), Twitter, podcasts and giveaways. Fractal takes a 2% transaction fee on secondary sales on its marketplace. Fractal’s CEO is David Wurtz, who Kan knew because they were both early Y Combinator participants, and is credited as a co-creator of Google Drive.
