Author: Sharon, BlockBeats

Editor: Jaleel, BlockBeats

At the end of August, the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) made its first move against an NFT project, accusing the NFT project Founder's Keys of conducting unregistered securities offerings of encrypted assets. This has once again drawn attention to the regulatory compliance of NFT projects, and the already sluggish NFT market has suddenly seen more discussions about uncertainty.

However, at this time, there is an NFT project that is rising against the trend, attracting tens of millions of dollars in financing.

On September 11th, Animoca Brands announced that it will raise $20 million for the development of its PFP NFT project Mocaverse by issuing new common shares at a price of AUD 4.50 per share. As part of this financing, Animoca Brands issued free additional utility token subscription warrants to investors based on a 1:1 USD ratio.

According to information from the official website of Animoca Brands, this round of financing is the first round of financing for Mocaverse. Behind this financing are lead investor CMCC Global, as well as Kingsway Capital, Liberty City Ventures, GameFi Ventures, Sky Mavis founder Aleksander Larsen, Yield Guild Games founder Gabby Dizon, and institutional investors from Koda Capital.

It is reported that the new funds will be used to advance the Mocaverse project, including product development, promoting Web3 adoption, and ensuring partner relationships, in order to expand Animoca Brands' layout in the Web3 field. Since its inception at the end of last year, Mocaverse has carried many expectations of Animoca Brands and has also experienced some setbacks in its development. What are the characteristics of the Mocaverse project? What goals does Animoca Brands hope to achieve? BlockBeats has sorted this out in this article.

Animoca Brands' entrance to the Metaverse?

Mocaverse embodies Animoca Brands' desire to expand the user base of the cryptocurrency industry and create a gateway to the metaverse.

First-time financing, building a "portal"

The Mocaverse project has been online for nearly 10 months, but this financing is the first round of financing. Martin Baumann, co-founder of CMCC Global, the lead investor, said: "After establishing a long-term partnership with Animoca Brands, we are pleased to lead the first round of financing for Mocaverse. The project will unify Animoca Brands' unique portfolio of companies and become a gateway for hundreds of millions of new users to access the Web3 and Metaverse ecosystems."

Animoca Brands co-founder and CEO Yat Siu also pointed out: "We are deeply honored by the support of investors in Animoca Brands and its decentralized vision. The continued development of the Internet involves a shift from a hierarchical power structure to a self-determined power structure. The Mocaverse developed based on DAO can ensure that its community focuses on driving innovation and collaboration in the broader Animoca Brands ecosystem. In addition to building a vibrant community that allows users to participate in creating new economic opportunities, Mocaverse will also serve as a digital identity, reputation, and loyalty system for other decentralized organizations."

"Portal" is a key term that has taken shape in the Mocaverse industry.

Build an entrance for IP and Metaverse

In fact, as early as 2021, BlockBeats had interviewed Xiao Yi, who pointed out that IP is the entry point for people to enter the blockchain industry or the world of encryption. As a native NFT project of Animoca Brands, Mocaverse will naturally become the entry point for the Animoca Brands ecosystem and metaverse.

Related reading: "Interview with Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu: IP is the gateway for people to enter the virtual world".

As a company that started with games, Mocaverse showcases Animoca Brands' strong gaming DNA on its official website interface.

Mocaverse Official Website Screenshot

Xiao Yi founded Animoca Brands in 2014 as a mobile game developer, holding over 300 IPs including Doraemon, Ultraman, and Garfield. At the end of 2017, Animoca Brands officially entered the cryptocurrency industry and currently owns original games such as "The Sandbox", "Phantom Galaxies", "Life Beyond", "Crazy Kings", and "Crazy Defense Heroes", as well as subsidiaries such as The Sandbox, Blowfish Studios, Quidd, and GAMEE.

On December 15, 2022, Animoca Brands officially announced the establishment of Mocaverse as its PFP NFT project. According to the Mocaverse website, Mocaverse aims to build Web3 native tools to enhance the capabilities of products in the gaming, cultural, and entertainment verticals, allowing users to create their own digital identities, accumulate reputation, earn and spend loyalty points, and access the Animoca Brands ecosystem using their digital identities.

Mocaverse Dynamic Screenshot

What are the unique features of Mocaverse that make it a key focus for Animoca Brands?

2 Days Sold $5.5 Million, Embracing Both Social and Gaming

Backed by Animoca, it attracted a lot of attention upon self-sale

In January 2023, Animoca Brands announced the specific admission rules for Mocaverse - institutional and retail investors of Animoca Brands, employees of Animoca Brands and its subsidiaries, management teams of companies in Animoca Brands' Web3 investment portfolio, partners of Animoca Brands, and members of Mocalist have the opportunity to participate in the minting of NFTs (MocaMint) in Mocaverse.

In the same month, Animoca Brands opened registration for Mocalist and received over 1000 eligible registrants within half an hour. Brian D. Evans from BDE Ventures also joined in.

Mocaverse Dynamic Screenshot

After open registration, Mocaverse NFT holders can enjoy some exclusive offers and benefits from Animoca Brands, such as exclusive participation in company events, masterclasses, and seminars. At the same time, holders can also have priority access to information on new project launches and exclusive access to Animoca Brands' Web3 platform. In addition, NFT holders will also receive Moca XP Tokens, which they can stake and use within the community to earn rewards or participate in activities.

On March 9th, the official website of Animoca Brands announced that MocaMint of Mocaverse has been completed, with a total of 8888 MocaMint minted by participating members. Within the first 48 hours, MocaMint sales reached 3552 ETH (approximately 5.5 million USD).

It can be said that with the backing of Animoca Brands' Mocaverse, it has attracted a lot of attention from the beginning.

Joining forces with CyberConnect and Rarible to build an NFT ecosystem

In the days to come, Mocaverse will continue to collaborate with CyberConnect and Rarible to jointly build the NFT ecosystem.

On June 15th, Mocaverse collaborated with the open-source cross-chain NFT protocol Rarible to launch a customized NFT marketplace called "Mocaverse Marketplace", which allows for the trading of verified Mocaverse NFTs. It is worth noting that Mocaverse Marketplace will not charge any platform fees for transactions related to Mocaverse.

When Rarible was launched in 2019, it was considered one of the "most well-known" projects in the NFT industry. In collaboration with Mocaverse, Rarible co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Alex Salnikov stated that, "In order to create an innovative brand with higher levels of community engagement and achieve long-term growth and prosperity, every community needs to have its own unique, secure, and non-reliant on third-party policies home."

On August 15th, Mocaverse collaborated with CyberConnect to build a decentralized social layer. CyberConnect's intelligent account infrastructure, CyberAccount, provides support for Mocaverse's identity layer, offering Animoca Brands' subsidiaries the opportunity to build their own social graphs and enhance cross-game, product, and service interoperability for users.

CyberConnect is considered one of the leading social networks in the current encryption industry, while CyberAccount is the first scalable and thoroughly reviewed ERC-4337 supported smart account in the encryption industry. As of August 2023, the CyberConnect protocol has 1.2 million user profiles, with 400,000 active wallets executing over 16.3 million transactions per month. Its native social application, Link3, has 940,000 monthly active users.

According to the official website of Animoca Brands, Mocaverse has a certain real-world basis in collaboration with CyberConnect: "Although existing wallet or account solutions such as MetaMask allow developers to leverage the native user base of the cryptocurrency industry, they lack some capabilities to enable developers to deploy better personalized user experiences. By deeply integrating with users' CyberAccounts in a social graph, developers can better develop decentralized applications, significantly shorten the time to market for products, and cover a wider range of user groups. Animoca Brands aims to increase adoption rates by using this "super account" approach and provide developers with a pioneering user onboarding solution."

Conclusion

Animoca Brands website shows that Mocaverse will soon launch a series of NFTs called Moca ID, which aims to allow users to create their own identity on the chain and participate in the Mocaverse ecosystem. It is reported that Moca ID holders will have exclusive access to the Mocaverse ecosystem experience and will receive "loyalty points" after active participation. At the same time, Mocaverse has also established the Moca DAO community to strengthen collaborative creation.

From these measures, it is not difficult to see that Mocaverse is working hard to connect the upstream and downstream of NFT, and build a more complete and flexible ecosystem. Mocaverse aims to build an ecosystem that integrates games, socializing, and trading, centered around education, games, architecture, and charity, as a gateway for Animoca Brands to open up the world of encryption to more people. Mocaverse also refers to the participants in this ecosystem as "Mocas" and divides them into five tribes: Dreamers, Builders, Angels, Connectors, and New Capitalists.

Currently, users can use the following tokens on the Ethereum mainnet (ERC-20) to mint their NFTs: ETH, USDC, APE, SAND, ASTRAFER, BONDLY, GMEE, REVV, TOWER, PRIMATE, DOSE, PROS, QUIDD. According to Opensea data, as of the time of writing, the total trading volume of Mocaverse has reached 8346 ETH, with a floor price of 0.78 ETH, and it has 2102 NFT holders.

Source: Dune

Dune data shows that the daily trading volume of the NFT market has been declining overall in the past three months, except for a slight increase at the end of June and early July. Now, backed by Animoca Brands, Mocaverse has already raised $20 million in its first round of financing. It is certain that if Mocaverse persists in building a sound NFT ecosystem and lays a solid foundation for development, it will surely go far.

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