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IOSG: Play to Earn is not sustainable, how to find the next Axie Infinity?

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Current chain swims industry to be in what stage?

原文标题：《 IOSG Weekly Brief | P2E 不可持续，如何寻找下一个 Axie Infinity #100 》

Source: IOSG

"Even if blockchain hadn't been invented, I still think the gaming market would see a breakthrough in growth over the next decade."

Starting from Maslow's hierarchy of needs Theory in Maslow's pyramid of human needs model (Maslow's hierarchy of Needs theory), at the bottom of the pyramid are people's physiological needs and security needs. And the upper needs are the needs of emotion and belonging, respect, knowledge, aesthetic and self-realization. The game industry is essentially about superstructure consumption, and there are different stages of superstructure demand.

In the game, these upper needs are constantly being met. For example, the first guilds in "World of Warcraft" exemplified a strong desire for emotion and belonging. "King of Glory", with billions of skins consumed each year, also reflects the need for respect and aesthetics. "Suffering" games like "Dark Souls" and "The Wolf" are the ultimate fulfillment of knowledge and self-actualization.

Throughout the development of human civilization, we are now at a very special turning point.

If we select a few historical years at random and cut a cross-section of the population, we will see that the vast majority of the population is running for physical and security needs, while a tiny elite of power is at the top of the pyramid, getting more spiritual needs. And that percentage has stayed the same. Yuval Noah Harari, author of A Brief History of Humankind, notes that we are moving from a society where productivity is scarce to one where productivity is excess. With the rapid development of industrial civilization, the subversion of production relations by information revolution and blockchain revolution, and the spillover of human productivity, we believe that the proportion of this cross section will appear a major adjustment for the first time. As a percentage of the population, more and more people will literally move out of poverty and start moving up the pyramid. More and more people will no longer be trapped in the daily food and clothing problem, but will seek spiritual consumption. Where will they go? Culture, art, all areas are great, there is a place to comfort the soul. But the most efficient and efficient destination for satisfying the soul must be the game.

Why do we like chain games?

Chain travel is essentially a bottom-up revolution about production relations.

As we all know, today's Web2.0 world is becoming increasingly inefficient and monopolistic, especially since the Internet's natural economies of scale are destined to become monopolistic indefinitely. As it is with social media, so it is with the games industry. Under monopoly, the average acquisition cost of a game has ballooned from a dollar or two to a hundred or two in a few years. Game producers and game consumers are being ruthlessly exploited. Good indie game developers can't break out of the loop, and millions of players are similarly fed a poor "game experience". The only people who profit are the platforms that race the land. A16z also said, "Your success is my opportunity." The success of Axie Infinity, a Web3.0 game, is a prelude to the grassroots revolt against the Web2.0 giants.

In traditional games, developers and players have an interdependent yet antagonistic relationship. Interdependence is because developers need players and players need developers; The opposite is because the developer wants to cut the leek (constantly selling more powerful equipment, diluting the player's wealth) and the player wants to get laid. In chain games, NFT ownership and token economies solve this problem to a large extent, making the player the actual owner of the game and putting the player and developer on the same side for the first time. This alignment of bilateral interests may unlock the true potential of chain games.

Current chain swims industry to be in what stage?

Although we are extremely optimistic about the future of chain tourism, the current development of chain tourism is just starting, chaotic, there is a long way to go. We believe that the development of chain games will go through three stages.

Stage one: Carnival

We are now in phase one.

In addition to the natural anti-monopoly properties of blockchain games, ultra-high topic and liquidity also make them the object of capital pursuit. When high liquidity first appeared, speculators and speculators soon became the first revelers. As in The Chinese stock market in the early 1990s, speculators seethed long before value investors entered the market. Unofficially, there are currently around 700,000 active players on Web3 (source: MixMarval), and you can imagine the number of speculators. There aren't as many real players (the real demand end) as we think. However, the demand-side portrait determines what producers are selected by the market. As a result, crude Ponzi mines such as CryptoMines and BinaryX are racing ahead to grab everyone's attention. The essence of pledge income in DeFi is to provide liquidity for DEX, and a large number of link games start to provide amazing pledge income when DEX is absent, which is obviously illogical.

Stage two: Disillusionment

The mining industry will still be pursued by capital, and the bubble will get bigger and bigger, and eventually burst one day. Maybe SLP revenue will fall below the average Filipino wage (as of this press, there are reports that the average Axie Infinity player's daily income has dropped below the Philippine minimum wage line), or maybe a $1 billion mining game will be wiped out in a matter of days. Markets would panic, speculators would flee, and what would be left behind would be rubble.

At this stage, miners will die en masse, and liquidity may flee faster than expected. Conversely, teams that stick to themselves, stick to principles, and work hard during the carnival phase will experience the least loss. Free to Play games like Sky Weaver and EdenBrawl will continue to absorb real users and grow steadily.

Stage 3: Nirvana

In fact, only when the bubble bursts can true value investors, creators, and users truly participate. To some extent, we expect a pullback. Because this will be the best baptism and training for revolutionaries. The Axie Infinity team started the project in 18 years. They experienced numerous failures and blows, and climbed up step by step from the ruins of the bear market. Sky Mavis is also a team that can withstand risks, stand loneliness and have real ideals. We are highly skeptical that such teams will survive the storm, given that many projects today can generate huge profits from a single white paper. Bear markets wash away the unfocused mediocrities and frauds and leave behind the determined revolutionaries.

At this stage, the economic model of chain games will also undergo structural changes, and its liquidity will transition from the Ponzi mechanism to attract speculators (such as Cryptomines) to the gambling mechanism to attract "gamblers" (such as BinaryX gambling card and Magic Westward Journey). The final focus is on attracting players from game mechanics (such as King of Honor skins and other non-investment paid content).

Is Play to Earn sustainable?

It's impossible to talk about chain games without talking about P2E (Play to Earn). The core of P2E is similar to didi's strategy of trading profits for market share in the early stage. However, its clever feature lies in the introduction of financial and even Ponzi elements, so that enterprises do not need to burn their own money to buy volume, but to burn speculators' money to buy volume. P2E is a great marketing tool, but definitely not the core driver of chain games' long-term growth.

Here's a fable:

An old man living alone, enjoying his comfortable rural life. But one day, a group of children came to the old man's backyard to play soccer. The noise of the children made the old man very unhappy. The old man had an idea. He went to the children and said, I love it when you play soccer in my backyard. I will give you a dollar for an hour a day. The children listened to very excited, every day happily ran to continue to play football. A week later, the old man said to the boys, you can continue to play football, but I don't want to pay you any more money. The children walked away dejected and never reappeared in the old man's backyard.

There is a psychological theory behind this story, called the over-justification Effect, in which everyone tries to make their own and others' actions look reasonable, and thus always looks for reasons for their actions. Once they have found enough causes, they rarely go any further and, in their search for causes, always look first for the obvious external causes. Thus, when external causes are sufficient to explain behavior, people generally stop looking for internal causes. Old people are cleverly exploiting the excessive-justification effect.

Going back to P2E, when players play for financial gain, but at some point there will be diminishing returns (Axie's returns have been significantly reduced), even if the game itself is fun, will they be like the kids who used to love playing soccer?

Gameplay is somewhat incompatible with P2E, which greatly reduces the marginal effect of gameplay. Therefore, those over-fantasy games and play to earn both projects, it is likely to face the volume of transactions than mining games, users are not as big as traditional games.

P2E is also clearly unsustainable from an economic point of view. Axie's P2E is built on the premise that new capital is coming in fast this summer and Axie is the dominant one. Looking ahead to 2022, when the already inabundant traffic is divided by thousands of online games, when the liquidity injection starts to slow down, the vast majority of games will be in a cycle where Ponzi will no longer thrive, and the revenue generated by the thunders will not even reach the average salary in the third world. In fact, a lot of bubbles have been unknowingly annihilated, such as ArmzLegend, which became popular by U standard predictor, could not withstand selling pressure soon after reaching its peak and crashed quickly.

It is worth mentioning that although Axie Infinity relies on Ponzi's reproductive play to rise quickly, after A16Z is re-injected into the field, we may soon see a discontinuous qualitative change breakthrough. Early Axie relied on subsidies from large customers to attract users and build IP addresses. With the help of capital, Axie may soon be able to move away from relying on the brutal Ponzi logic of growth and truly capture the value created by the game itself through quality content and the developer ecosystem.

What is our investment logic?

In our view, the three main contradictions in the online game industry today are:

It's hard for real players to get in

Game and Blockchain double talent shortage

Good game content is scarce

According to incomplete statistics, through the Web2 community to buy traffic diversion to the chain game, the loss is extremely high, registered wallet, replacement legal currency, download games... At each step, a large number of players were shut out. The funnel rate eventually does not exceed 1 in 10,000. Such data in the Internet product framework has been unable to use failed to describe, can be said to be blank.

How to get more Web2 players into the chain game is our first investment theme/logic. At the moment, community and esports themed guilds are a great link. Guilds provide players with assets, accounts, and greatly reduce the barriers to entry. In the near future, dao-based guilds are likely to become the largest traffic portal in Web3 gaming.

The second thing we care about is the developer ecosystem. The most imaginative part of Web3 is turning more people into content providers. How to empower developers to form a healthy and lasting creator economy is also a huge direction.

We need platforms and engines like Enjin, Ultra, Forte, MixMarvel to empower traditional game developers to understand blockchain technology, token architecture, and Web3 architecture and rules. On the other hand, Sandbox and Decentraland allow a lot more imagination. Serious game enthusiasts who don't know how to code may also be key builders of the game ecosystem in the future.

We think teams that really love games and understand the history of blockchain games will stay. The games they make will be epic. Liquidity access will also shift from Ponzi chasing to gambling and game content consumption. Maybe the market isn't quite there yet, but we do support high-quality works like Illuvium that are a little ahead of their time.

Although at present disorderly elephant is clumping, but we are sure, the chain swims the market in 2025, must be the market of a trillion level.

Part.2 Project progress after IOSG investment

Venkman Acala Reach cooperation and launch brand loyalty and NFT platform for customers

* E-commerce solutions

Project Venkman has announced Acala as a technology partner to build brand loyalty and NFT platforms for Its first customer, the Hive. TheCHIVE currently has 10 million monthly live users and has generated more than $400 million in revenue to date. In the future, Venkman will continue to work with Acala to introduce e-commerce solutions to more customers and brands, bringing blockchain services to the masses.

Oasis Foundation launches $160 million Eco Fund to support DeFi, NFT and Metaverse projects

* Support privacy computing platform

The Oasis Foundation has announced the launch of a $160 million eco-fund to support DeFi projects on the Oasis network, a private computing platform, as well as NFT and metasomes related applications. In addition to a donation from the Oasis Foundation, the eco-Fund has received funding from the Cryptocurrency Venture Capital Fund, AME Cloud Ventures, Dragonfly Capital Partners, Draper Dragon Fund, Electric Capital, FBG, Jump Capital, Kenetic Capital, NGC Ventures and Pantera Capital, among others.

Acala wins boca's first parallel chain slot

* DeFi platform

The first auction of boca's first parallel chain slots closed at 11am, with DeFi platform Acala winning the auction to claim the first slot. A total of 32.5 million DOT pieces worth $1.3 billion were locked up. After the first five auctions, Acala, along with the winners of the other four slots, will plug into Boca's relay chain on December 17, starting the block in a parallel chain.

Chainlink Keepers is online at Polygon

* Smart Contract automatic execution tool & NBSP;

Chainlink, a blockchain prognosticator solution, has announced that its decentralized smart contract auto-execution tool, Chainlink Keepers, is now available on Polygon. Chainlink Keepers use off-chain calculations that automatically trigger smart contract execution based on predefined conditions. Currently, smart contract developers built on Polygon can outsource their DevOps tasks to Chainlink Keepers.

0x API online Celo chain

* Decentralized trading agreements

0X API is now available on Celo blockchain. The 0X API is a decentralized financial stack that has supported over 21 million transactions by nearly 1.8 million users on Ethereum, Binance Smart Chain, Polygon, Avalanche and Fantom, with a total transaction volume of over $100 billion.

Part.3 Industry pulse

CUDOS will provide computing power monetizing software to more than 9 million Tingo mobile phone users in Nigeria

* Decentralized cloud computing networks

CUDOS, a decentralized cloud computing network, announced at the AIBC European Summit a partnership with Tingo, a leading Agricultural fintech company in Africa, to empower more than 9 million Nigerians to "feed the economy" through CUDOS 'mobile computing power realization software. Tingo mobile users will be able to run CUDOS hardware computing power realisation software on their smartphones, contributing computing power to distributed computing networks and earning a return. CUDOS tokens will also be circulated in Tingo's financial ecosystem as a means of payment for users. On this basis, Tingo will gradually expand the partnership with its business across Africa and South America. In addition, CUDOS will serve as a computing platform for educational institutions such as Nigerian research institutes and universities.

As part of the partnership, CUDOS tokens will also go live on Tingo's recently acquired European exchange CoinField. CUDOS network is a layer 1 blockchain and layer 2 computing and predictor network designed to provide decentralized, permissionless high performance computing at scale that can scale computing resources to hundreds of thousands of nodes. After bridging with Ethereum, Algorand, Boca and Cosmos, CUDOS will implement scalable computing and second-layer prognosticators on all bridged blockchains. CUDOS is currently in open beta, attracting more than 22,000 developers, and is expected to launch on the main network in the first quarter of next year.

Sanjian Capital transferred 17,895 ETH pieces to FTX, with a value of nearly $80 million

* Ethereum debate

An address tagged "Three Arrows Capital" transferred 17,895 ETH, worth about $78.35 million, to FTX, a derivatives exchange, after Su Zhu, founder of Three Arrows Capital, tweeted that he had abandoned Ethereum despite backing it in the past. No newcomer can afford the high cost of Ethereum, the culture is largely shaped by the founder's dilemma, and everyone has become so rich that they have forgotten their original intention.

The average Axie Infinity player's daily income drops below the Philippine minimum wage line

* Blockchain game projects

According to a report written by Naavik researcher Lars Doucet, while Axie Infinity, a blockchain game project, grew exponentially in the first half of this year, the average gamer's daily revenue declined. The report from Naavik, a research and consulting firm, discusses blockchain games, NFTs and Axie Infinity. "After months of incredible growth, the daily earnings of the typical Axie Infinity player (the" scholar "in the Philippines) have dropped below the Philippine minimum wage line, with the exception of higher-ranked players, and even their earnings have declined since August," Doucet wrote in the report. The report explains that "academics" are typically players in developing countries who can't afford the Axies necessary to play the game. These assets are provided by "sponsors," who take a cut of their earnings. The report also noted that the results showed that "Axie Infinity's daily active users (DAUs) have skyrocketed," with cumulative DAUs of about 1.45 million to 1.95 million between September and October. Globally, The Axie Infinity is most popular in the Philippines and Venezuela.

The proposal of "Forte, BitDAO and Alameda to invest $500 million to build GameFi incubator Game7" was passed

* GameFi incubator

The previous proposal of "Forte, BitDAO, Alameda et al to invest $500 million to build GameFi incubator Game7" has now been approved by SnapShot. Under the previous proposal, Forte would invest $100 million and BitDAO $400 million. In addition, the proposed initial distribution of ownership is 69 to 79 percent for BitDAO, 9 to 19 percent for Forte, up to 20 percent for community partners, and 1 percent each for Mirana and Alameda Research. Game7 will accelerate the adoption of blockchain technology in the gaming industry, invest in blockchain gaming companies, and provide grant programs to develop open source ecosystems.

Meta unveils its latest breakthrough in tactile gloves

* Touch gloves

Meta shared the latest breakthroughs in haptic glove research from his VR technology company Reality Labs, noting that the product has been in development for seven years. The company shared a video of two people testing tactile gloves in a demo of Metaverse, clenching their fists, picking up blocks, throwing things, shaking hands, knocking down dominoes and playing with blocks together. Meta says the glove relies on haptic rendering to send "precise commands" to the hand's actuators, which correspond to tracking technology to pinpoint the hand's position and the properties of virtual objects in the metasverse.

ConstitutionDAO failed to obtain a copy of the United States Constitution

Auction of copies of the Constitution

ConstitutionDAO failed to buy the last privately owned printed first edition of the US Constitution at Sotheby's public auction on Thursday. The "official version" of the U.S. Constitution instead went to an unidentified bidder for $43.2 million, meaning DAO failed to achieve its goal of putting it "in the hands of the people." An announcement on official Discord. "Although this is not the outcome we had hoped for, we still made history tonight," the post read. (Correction: CoinDesk reversed course after reporting that ConstitutionDAO had successfully bid $41 million for a copy of the U.S. Constitution at Sotheby's.) A total of 17,437 users donated, according to official statistics. ConstitutionDAO says it will refund users who donate.

President Joe Biden signed into law an infrastructure bill that leaves the definition of crypto brokers to the Treasury Department

* US encryption legislation

President Joe Biden signed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act on Monday, leaving the definition of crypto brokers to the Treasury Department. It is understood that as part of the bill's add-on provisions, infrastructure includes a new definition of "broker" among participants in cryptocurrency networks. These expanded definitions are designed to increase IRS transparency, and the act states that future transactions of digital assets worth more than $10,000 should be reported to the IRS or IRS. But there is a risk that network participants such as node operators will be required to report encrypted transaction identification information. Earlier today, Senators Ron Wyden and Cynthia Lummis introduced new legislation aimed at limiting those definitions in the statute, echoing language in the original compromise bill.

National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) : a high pressure situation will be formed to continuously regulate virtual currency "mining" activities

* the National Development and Reform Commission

On November 10, the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) held a video conference on virtual currency "mining" to report the monitoring and remediation of virtual currency "mining", and to deploy the next stage of work, requiring provinces and municipalities to earnestly shoulder their territorial responsibilities, build systems and monitor, Meng Wei, spokesperson of the National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC) said today. Virtual currency "mining" activities in the region shall be cleaned up and regulated, and "mining" activities involved in the computer rooms of state-owned units shall be strictly investigated and punished. In the next step, we will focus on industrial-type centralized "mining", state-owned units involved in "mining" and bitcoin "mining" to carry out a comprehensive rectification. For the implementation of residential electricity price units, if found to be involved in virtual currency "mining" activities, will be studied to impose punitive electricity price, forming a continuous crackdown on virtual currency "mining" activities of high pressure situation.

South Korean lawmakers oppose the "know sender" (KTS) rule for crypto transactions

* Encryption legislation in South Korea

South Korea's crypto community may soon face strict reporting requirements for all cryptocurrency transactions, with the country's National Assembly currently debating whether it should implement a "know the sender" (KTS) rule. The Political Affairs committee of the South Korean legislature heard arguments against the proposed KTS rules today, with lawmakers and industry experts opposing the proposed legislation. If written into law, the KTS rule would require the enterprise receiving any encrypted asset to verify and report the name of the sender and its location. In the case of business-to-business transactions the legal status of the sender and the number of employees must also be reported. The KTS rules will also require cryptocurrency senders from outside South Korea to register with the financial Services Commission (FSC), the country's financial regulator. The rules could trigger an initial shutdown of all crypto transactions in the country until all parties comply, although a grace period could be introduced alongside the legislation.

India's prime minister holds crypto meeting to urge a ban on misleading advertising

* Encryption legislation in India

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hosted a conference on Crypto in India on Saturday. The conference was attended by the Reserve Bank of India, the Ministries of Finance and Home affairs and experts from across the country. Officials at the meeting agreed that some Crypto platforms were misleading the country's youth and needed to stop advertising them. The meeting came days after Shaktikanta Das, governor of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), issued a warning about Crypto and warned investors of potential pitfalls. Shaktikanta Das said the Crypto market was a concern for the country's macroeconomic and financial stability. Other Indian lawmakers have also raised concerns about the misuse of Crypto for money laundering and terrorist financing. Still, Crypto is increasingly being used in India, and several Bollywood stars have even been involved in promoting the exchange in recent weeks. The move comes after the Indian government in March considered a law to ban Crypto, imposing fines on anyone trading or even holding such digital assets in the country.

Part.4 Investment and financing progress

Pawnfi completed 3 million usyuanFinancing, DCG lead the round

* Non-standard asset liquidity agreement

Non-standard asset liquidity agreement Pawnfi announced the completion of $3 million strategic round of financing, this round of financing led by grayscale parent company Digital Currency Group, Investors included Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, Polygon, DeFi Alliance, Hashkey Capital, Everest Venture Group, SNZ and 6Block.

CyberConnect completes $10 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital and Sky9 Capital.

*Web3 startup & NBSP;

CyberConnect, a crypto startup that develops tools for Web3 social media, gaming and meta-universe applications, has raised a $10 million seed round led by Multicoin Capital and Sky9 Capital. Investors included Animoca Brands, Draper Dragon, Hashed, Zoo Capital, Smrti Lab and Mask Network. CyberConnect is working on a decentralized Social Graph Protocol, where people's social connections on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, The protocol is said to make it easier for Web3 developers to build applications such as social media, games and meta-universes. CyberConnect has also developed an application called CyberChat to demonstrate how social graph data can be leveraged. The application will be integrated with the CyberConnect protocol. CyberConnect founder Wilson Wei said the funding round, equity + SAFT (Simple Protocol for Future Tokens), will help the company double its current 15-person team, expand the Web3 developer community, launch its protocol later this month and support Ethereum, The team plans to implement support for other blockchains as early as later this year.

PSTAKE completed $10 million strategic financing, led by Three Arrows Capital, Sequoia India, Galaxy Digital and others

* Liquidity Pledge Agreement & NBSP;

Cosmos Liquidity pledge agreement from Persistence team pSTAKE closed a $10 million strategic funding round on Tuesday, led by Three Arrows Capital, Sequoia India, Galaxy Digital and Defiance Capital, Other VCS involved include Coinbase Ventures, Tendermint Ventures, Kraken Ventures, Alameda Research, Sino Global Capital and Spartan Group, Angel investors include Ajit Tripathi, head of institutional Business development at Aave, Do Kwon, founder of Terra, and Tascha Punyaneramitdee, co-founder of Alpha Finance. It is understood that pSTAKE aims to unlock the liquidity of pledged assets and bring PoS assets into DeFi. Uncapped support for Cosmos' ATOM and Persistence's XPRT is online, and pSTAKE's total lockup value (TVL) is over $30 million. The team plans to continue expanding pSTAKE support for other major PoS chains, including Ethereum 2.0, Terra, Polkadot, Solana, and more.

Spectral Finance has closed a $6.75 million financing round led by Polychain Capital

Spectral Finance inc. announced that it has raised $6.75 million in financing, led by Polychain Capital, Galaxy Digital, Social Capital, ParaFi Capital, Edge & AMP. Node Ventures and MetaPurse Ventures contributed. Spectral Finance aims to create a programmable credit ecosystem on Ethereum that promotes on-chain capital efficiency through credit risk analysis. The agreement was founded by Sishir Varghese, a Columbia University graduate who co-founded Alphachain, a blockchain consulting and investment firm.

StarkWare has completed a $50 million Series C funding round at a $2 billion valuation and will launch StarkNet Alpha* Ethereum Tier 2 developer before the end of the month

Zk-rollups layer 2 ethereum developer StarkWare raised $50 million in a Series C round, now valued at $2 billion, led by Sequoia Capital, Other investors include Paradigm, Three Arrows Capital, Alameda Research, IOSG Ventures, Founders Fund and others. The Series C funding brings StarkWare's total funding to date to $162 million. According to Uri Kolodny, co-founder and CEO of StarkWare, the company is already turning a profit. StarkEx, StarkWare's Ethereum extension engine, is used by several encryption projects, including dYdX, Sorare and Immutable. Kolodny said StarkEx has cleared more than $200 billion worth of transactions, facilitated about 50 million transactions and served hundreds of thousands of customers at "very cheap" Gas costs. The new money will be used to grow its team and ecosystem. The team will launch StarkNet Alpha on the Ethereum main network before the end of the month. The main difference between StarkEx and StarkNet is that the former is a licensed tailor-made expansion engine, while the latter is a license-free decentralized ZK-rollup that supports independent deployment of smart contracts.

Nym closes $13 million in financing, led by A16Z. * Privacy infrastructure

Nym, a privacy infrastructure, has raised $13m at a valuation of $270m. This round of financing was led by A16Z, with DCG, Tayssir Capital, Huobi Ventures, HashKey, Fenbushi Capital and other investors participating. In July, Nym announced the closing of A $6 million Series A funding round led by Polychain Capital, which will be used to develop network infrastructure in business scenarios.

ConsenSys has raised $200 million at a valuation of $3.2 billion

* Ethereum software incubator

Ethereum software incubator ConsenSys announced Wednesday that it has closed a $200 million funding round that values the company at $3.2 billion, just six months after it raised $65 million from jpmorgan Chase & Co and mastercard. Investors include Marshall Wace, Third Point, ParaFi Capital, Think Investments, IOSG Ventures, Dragonfly Capital, Electric Capital, Spartan Group, DeFiance Capital, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, HSBC, and more.

ConsenSys' mission is to unleash the collaborative power of the community by making Web3 universally easy to use, access, and build. Its flagship products include MetaMask, a wallet, and Infura, an Ethereum developer tool. ConsenSys also announced that MetaMask has grown 36-fold in the last year and now has more than 21 million monthly active users. Infura is used by 350,000 developers, including MetaMask and the leading DeFi and NFT platforms. The new funds will be used to continue to grow the team and support the rapid expansion of MetaMask and Infura products. ConsenSys CEO Joe Lubin says that in the coming year ConsenSys' software division plans to expand with a new division focused on NFT, as well as potential software development tools for games and other content.

Mem Protocol closes $3.1 million in funding, led by A16Z

Web3 social layer building tool Mem Protocol completed 3.1 million USD financing, led by A16Z. Other investors include Balaji Srinivasan, former Coinbase CHIEF technology officer, Olaf Carlson-Wee, founder and CEO of Polychain Capital, and Charlie Cheever, co-founder of Quora. Mem is currently undergoing Alpha testing with a planned launch in early 2022. Founded in May 2021, Mem aims to build a decentralized social media protocol centered on data sovereignty, enabling everyone to have their own circle of friends, explore the blockchain world and earn income by sharing knowledge. Mem Protocol currently builds a browser about profiles, allowing new users to add verifiable on-chain identities that can be used to ask questions, post rewards and raise money through reputation and smart contracts.

BlockchainSpace raised $3.75 million in seed funding, led by Animoca Brands.

*P2E Game guild

BlockchainSpace, the P2E gaming industry, announced a $3.75 million seed round led by Animoca Brands, Spartan Group, and Infinity Ventures Crypto. 3Commas Capital, Arca, Bitscale, CMS, Coingecko, Fenbushi Capital, GBV Capital, Mechanism Capital, Parataxis, Petrock Capital, Sfermion, Stablenode and YGG participated.