Twitch Founder’s NFT Marketplace Fractal Raises $35M

The Fractal NFT marketplace, which is a game-focused NFT marketplace has recently raised $35M in funding. Twitch co-founder Justin Kan launched Fractal in December.

The platform functions as a marketplace for players to buy Solana-based NFTs directly from game companies. Every single game that has minted using Fractal’s “launchpad” has sold out. The largest is the Tiny Colony game, which raised $2M at launch.

Again as of yesterday, the company raised $35M from investors including Paradigm and Mulitcoin Capital. Kan said that “NFTs are headed towards having more utility.” Coming from a gaming background, having founded Twitch, he believes NFTs will play a major part in the gaming industry moving forward.

Fractal Senses a Shift in the Gaming Industry

Fractal’s focus is on using NFT technology to tokenize in-game assets. For example games like FIFA and Fortnite made tens of billions of dollars selling in-game items. With the Fractal NFT marketplace, gamers actually own their digital assets and can trade them outside the game.

Since NFTs have become more mainstream, gamers have had negative sentiments towards them. Beliefs about the blockchains’ environmental impact and company profit schemes have negatively affected gaming NFTs.

Play-to-earn gaming is one of the biggest crypto trends of 2022. Additionally, we’ve seen a massive increase in seed funding for NFT gaming protocols. Some individuals are even calling for play-to-earn games to take crypto fully mainstream. Again, this is just an opinion, but could well happen.

The Fractal NFT marketplace has made it clear that they are supporting games that are creating decentralized economies. In conclusion, Justin Kan is looking to Web3 and NFT gaming for his next high-growth venture, leaving behind Twitch, and committing to scaling Fractal.