Gamefi has been the talk of the town in crypto for a while now, and growing institutional interest suggests there’s plenty of race left to run. Whether it’s Gemini raising $400m to facilitate access to the metaverse, or the Tron Foundation launching a $300m gamefi fund, an apparently endless river of capital is flowing into the space and nourishing the impression that very soon, we’ll all be donning VR headsets and devoting our free time to exploring, interacting and earning in immersive virtual reality worlds.
The latest venture to welcome a seven-figure investment is Galaxy Fight Club, a MOBA game built on the Polygon blockchain. In its latest seed and private sale, the cross-IP game raised $7 million in a round led by Animoca Brands, Sequoia Capital and Skyvision Capital, having won investment from The Chernin Group, YGG SEA, Spartan Capital, Sfermion, PKO Investments, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Rarestone Capital and many others.
Galaxy Wars Commence
Distinct from many of its battle-based competitors, the project seeks to emulate Nintendo’s Super Smash Bros franchise by providing a stage where players from around the world can bring their own NFTs (Cryptopunks, BAYC, etc) to the party and fight to earn rewards.
By giving NFT owners from different communities an opportunity to use their weird and wonderful assets on an interoperable platform, Galaxy Fight Club seeks to create a sustainable ecosystem that challenges the current siloed model. As the GFC team sees it, every single NFT project is a lego-brick just waiting to be connected to others.
The concept has clearly found favour with the industry’s venture capital firms: over two dozen parties participated in the bootstrapping round, and The Chernin Group’s Partner Jarrod Dicker sees Galaxy Fight Club as a terrific bet. “There are two major trends coming to crypto gaming, shepherding in the utility of PFP (profile picture) NFTs and making play-to-earn games more fun. Galaxy Fight Club is pioneering both,” he says.
“Building off of the composability nature of major NFT projects, Galaxy Fight Club is creating a new value for these communities by presenting a fun way to leverage their favourite projects.”
As well as opening the floodgates to multiple NFT collections, Galaxy Fight Club features its own platform-native Genesis Fighter avatars that generate rewards (5-15 $GCOINs daily) simply for holding them in your wallet. These native fighters provoked plenty of hype when they sold last year, with the collection of 10,127 NFTs selling for close to $10 million. This collection accounted for 40% of the platform’s total supply.
Whether players decide to wage war with a tricked-out genesis fighter, an NFT from elsewhere, or an automated default fighter with base stats, their avatar can be put to the test in PvP Deathmatches, 3v3 Team Tournaments and 10-person Battle Royales with a range of prizes up for grabs, including $GCOIN, weapons, even ETH.
“We see huge potential for protocols integrating increased utility of their NFTs, rather than being solely a social status symbol,” says Skyvision Capital Partner Patrick Wu. “The GFC team has a wealth of experience in understanding products and has designed an easy, fun and interactive game.”
Galaxy Fight Club has already formed a number of key partnerships that could help it achieve its lofty ambitions, not least with several gamefi guilds – Perion DAO, Avocado Guild, YGG Sea and Path DAO. Having now completed a bumper funding round, the project looks well placed to make a splash in crypto’s hottest and fastest-growing space.