Published on: 04/04/2022

Twitch co-founder’s NFT marketplace raises $35 million in funding

On April 1, Twitch co-founder Justin Kan‘s gaming NFT marketplace, Fractal has raised $35M in funding after it was launched in December last year. Apparently, prior to launching Fractal on December 30, the project’s community on Discord had reached 107,000 members.

Kan explained his intention behind creating the San Francisco-based gaming NFT marketplace. For him, communicating with players is the key, in his case, the project’s community on Discord, dedicating the NFT marketplace to serve players’ needs matters to Kan and his team.

“While the NFT world is rife with scams and rug pulls, our goal is to build Fractal into the trusted marketplace for the best blockchain games and triple-A titles that are coming out,” Kan said. “What we’ve learned is that the best gaming companies want to be on a marketplace that is dedicated to serving their needs.”

More about Fractal

Intentionally, Fractal serves as a marketplace for players keen to purchase Solana-based NFTs directly from video game companies. Since it was launched, video games minted through Kan’s marketplace have sold out, one of which and perhaps the largest is the Tiny Colony, raising over $2 million at launch.

According to multiple reports, Fractal’s $35 million funding was mainly from two investors, namely Paradigm and Multicoin Capital.

Kan explained his optimism for Fractal and shared his belief over why blockchain technology would provide a better model in the gaming industry. He puts heavy emphasis on two things, a much more robust open economy and mass people participation to build upon such an economy.

“The reason why I think it’s going to win is it’s better for both the game and for the game developer and for the players. And for the game developer, the reason it’s when you’re basically making an economy from a closed economy to an open economy. And when you make an open economy, I think it’ll be proven that it’s just much more robust,” he said.

“The more people build on it, you know, with other people building games on top of your entities, the better it becomes.”

New gaming business model, shift in gaming industry

Coming from a video gaming background and responsible for the inception of the world’s most popular live-streaming platform, Twitch, alongside fellow co-founders Emmett Shear Michael Seibel Kyle Vogt, and Kevin Lin—Kan also explained that there is a notable shift to blockchain assets in the gaming industry. He believes that such a shift will be one that is bigger than that of Twitch.

“Fractal is building a trust layer in the web 3 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 triple-A gaming studios with large communities to bring the coolest game experiences to players,” Kan explained.

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.”

Adding to Kan’s optimism is Paradigm co-founder and managing partner Matt Huang, who praised the man behind Fractal and is more than prepared financially to help his vision.

“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,” Huang said in a statement.

“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.”