Binance Smart Chain and Animoca Brands set up $200M investment program for blockchain gaming projects

Binance Smart Chain’s $1B Growth Program, the accelerator arm of the leading DeFi, NFT and GameFi infrastructure platform, has launched a $200 million investment program with Animoca Brands, the company driving digital property rights via NFTs and gaming to build the open metaverse. The investment program will accelerate and incubate early crypto gaming startups that are building on Binance Smart Chain (BSC).

BSC $1B Growth Program and Animoca Brands are co-investing up to $100 million each, which will be utilized to accelerate shortlisted game projects in the multi-billion dollar crypto niche of GameFi.

Animoca Brands is a major name in blockchain gaming and the open metaverse. Its subsidiaries include The Sandbox, Blowfish Studios, Quidd, GAMEE, nWay, Bondly, Lympo and various others. It has a large portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships, including investments in over 100 of the most promising NFT-related companies and projects such as Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Bitski, Harmony, Alien Worlds, and Star Atlas.

“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,” said Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director at Binance Smart Chain.

“With this co-investment, projects building on BSC will get the opportunity to gain insights and expertise from leading gaming giants such as Animoca Brands, along with 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,” she added.

BSC is one of the largest blockchain ecosystems with over 2.1 million daily active addresses in the past weeks. In 2021, games and play-to-earn opportunities on BSC have gone through a significant uptick in traffic and unique wallet interactions.

BSC currently bolsters an ecosystem of crypto games including RPGs, strategy-battle arenas, sports, digital entertainment, adventure story based, logic, creative, and social games. The majority of BSC based gaming projects have developed NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn models with fungible tokens and/or NFT rewards. These GameFi projects have the potential to emerge as metaverses with their own inbuilt economy.

“Early GameFi projects require funding to build their products, and need industry expertise for open-world gameplay and tokenomics, as well as networking opportunities to establish growth in the blockchain gaming and open metaverse. This investment program will provide these necessities to the projects that we think have the potential to take blockchain mainstream,” said Yat Siu, the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Animoca Brands.

About Binance Smart Chain
Binance Smart Chain is a sovereign smart contract blockchain delivering Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible programmability. Designed to run in parallel with Binance Chain, Binance Smart Chain retains the former’s fast execution times and low transaction fees while adding Smart Contracts functionality to support compatible dApps. For more information on Binance Smart Chain, visit https://www.binance.org/#smartChain

About Animoca Brands
Animoca Brands, ranked in the Financial Times list of High Growth Companies Asia-Pacific 2021, is a leader in digital entertainment, blockchain, and gamification that is driving digital property rights via NFTs and gaming to help build the open metaverse. It develops and publishes a broad portfolio of products including the REVV token and SAND token; original games including The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes; and products utilizing hundreds of popular intellectual properties including Formula 1®, Disney, WWE, Power Rangers, MotoGP™, and Doraemon. The company has multiple subsidiaries, including The Sandbox, Blowfish Studios, Quidd, GAMEE, nWay, Pixowl, Bondly, and Lympo. Animoca Brands has a growing portfolio of more than 100 investments in NFT-related companies and decentralized projects that are contributing to building the open metaverse, including Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Bitski, Harmony, Alien Worlds, Star Atlas, and others. For more information visit www.animocabrands.com or follow on Twitter or Facebook.

About Binance Smart Chain $1B Growth Program
Binance, the world’s leading blockchain ecosystem and cryptocurrency platform, launched a $1 billion Growth Program for Binance Smart Chain, to accelerate adoption of digital assets and blockchain technology in October 2021. The program is divided into 4 categories: $500M investment program, $100M Talent development, $100M Liquidity incentive and $300M Builder rewards. A range of multiple programs are set-up under its umbrella to empower the growth of cryptocurrencies worldwide. BSC’s growth attracted 100M+ DeFi users with its initial funding of $100 million. With the new contribution of $1B it plans to accelerate global mass adoption of digital assets to become the first-ever blockchain ecosystem with one billion users. For more information, visit - https://www.binance.org/en/1b-growth-fund