Things are really humming on my big Blockchain Game Investment sheet.
Tracking over 250 investments and over 1,000 investors (including 250 angels), the sector’s velocity doesn’t show any signs of dropping away any time soon.
In fact it’s accelerating.
Back in 2020, there was around $75 million of investment (20 deals) into blockchain games.
That rose spectacularly in 2021 to $4.2 billion from 160 deals, and has already broken the $1 billion mark (20 deals) during January 2022.
As a comparison 2021 broke down thus:
Q1 2021: $473 million
Q2 2021: $399 million
Q3 2021: $1.3 billion
Q4 2021: $2 billion
So — one month in — Q1 2022 is shaping up to be the biggest quarter yet.
And this makes sense if we look at the biggest raises in January.
OpenSea completed its Series C round of $300 million at a $13.3 billion valuation, with Animoca Brands raising $358,888,888 — its fourth raise within the past 12 months — at a $5 billion valuation.
These rank as the fifth and the third biggest deals respectively to-date.
So, not only are we seeing increased volume in the small Pre/Seed stages, but companies who successfully completed funding six months ago are now looking to take advantage of higher valuations with accelerated Series A (and B) rounds.
We’re also seeing a wider range of companies funded with announcements from companies in India (nCore, IndiGG) and Africa (Carry1st) being a focus of recent weeks.
Keeping pace, VCs continue to increase their firepower too.
Ex-a16z-er Katie Haun is attempting to raise $900 million for her new fund, while a16z itself is after another $4.5 billion, this after closing what was then described as a “massive” $2.2 billion crypto fund in June 2020. And let’s not forget, Paradigm announced its $2.5 billion fund in November 2021.
In other words, the investment surface is still expanding and I don’t think valuations are going south any time soon.
Ronin news
After months of people (including me) yield farming the Ronin blockchain’s RON token, it’s actually gone live at a $500 million market cap (at time of writing).
Just like ETH on Ethereum or SOL on Solana, RON is the native token of the Ronin blockchain, and will eventually be required to make transactions, although a certain numbers of transactions are currently free.
As Sky Mavis points out, Ronin has 250,000 DAUWs, $5 billion-worth of assets (mainly AXS, ETH and SLP) and handled 15% of all NFT transactions during 2021.
Of course, all that activity is currently supporting Axie Infinity so it will be fascinating to see how quickly (or if) other developers and projects decide to launch on Ronin instead of on the likes of Polygon, Flow and Solana.
If nothing else, Ronin does have over 2 million installed wallets and a lot of them are installed on mobile devices.
You can read more on the Ronin Litepaper.
Johnny Depp NFT news
Captain Jack Sparrow to many, Johnny Depp is launching his own NFT art series — on the WAX blockchain. (Actually the art looks pretty good.)
Another Axie Infinity Competitor Hits the Skids news
Polygon horse racing game Pegaxy has only been live for a couple of months but it’s already hit a fundamental game design bug.
If only there was a tool that helped blockchain game developers better understand how to design their economies across dynamic states!
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