- NPC Labs has raised $21 million from a number of investors, including Hashed and Pantera Capital.
- The web3 gaming infrastructure firm, co-founded by three former Coinbase workers, hopes to increase the uptake of on-chain gaming with the aid of B3.fun, a scaling platform built on Base.
Pre-seed and seed fundraising rounds for NPC Labs, a web3 gaming infrastructure firm co-founded by three former Coinbase employees, have raised a total of $21 million.
Thanks to the leadership of the most recent $18 million seed round, NPC Labs has raised $21 million in total funding, including a recent $3 million pre-seed round, the company said on Monday. The other investors in the rounds include Bitscale Capital, Mantle EcoFund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Sfermion, and Mirana Ventures.
NPC Labs co-founder and CEO Daryl Xu said that the company was established in April of this year, that it began raising money at that time, and that it swiftly completed the process earlier this month. Regarding the round’s structure and valuation, he declined to comment.
Along with Viktoriya Hying and Sean Geng, two other former Coinbase coworkers, Xu cofounded NPC Labs. He was previously the gaming and onramp lead at Coinbase’s Layer 2 project Base. Hying was the NFT and creator lead at Base before joining NPC Labs as co-founder and chief operational officer. Geng was a technical manager at Coinbase prior to joining NPC Labs as co-founder and chief technology officer.
The three want to see more on-chain gaming adopted through NPC Labs. We discovered, as Base Day 0 contributors, that gaming with actual people rather than bots had a lot of active involvement and benefit beyond conjecture, Xu said. Upon observing this pattern, we started investigating methods to rapidly expand the gaming ecosystem and strive towards developing an easy, engaging, and enjoyable experience to attract additional people to the network.
NPC Laboratories, B3.fun
NPC Labs is the main developer of B3.fun, an ecosystem for game scalability based on Base. According to Xu, chain abstraction technology in collaboration with ChainSafe enables B3.fun, a microservices-like Layer 3 ecosystem on Base, to support high transaction rates per second, nearly gasless transactions, and no need for consumers to play the games on bridging or switching networks. We think we can create a long-lasting on-chain gaming culture and ecosystem by working to create the best in class infrastructure for developers and a straightforward, frictionless onboarding process for players, Xu continued.
According to Xu, web2 game creators are beginning to recognize the possibilities of on-chain gaming as a new channel for distribution as well as a more effective means of making money. However, he claimed that the on-chain development procedure is still too challenging. B3.fun, according to Xu, aims to act as a one-stop shop for game developers, taking care of their infrastructure and helping with marketing and distribution so they can focus on making games.
We are building a special infrastructure that provides developers complete control over everything, including growth and money creation as well as publishing. We will meet people where they are and take away obstacles to entry for cryptocurrency for games, Xu continued.
B3.fun token and mainnet launch?
Games created on Ethereum ETH -1.64%, Base, and other blockchains compatible with the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) can be played on the B3.fun platform, which is presently in testnet mode. However, NPC Labs stated that in the future, the platform can potentially include games from other chains, like Solana SOL -3.11%.
According to Xu, B3 and its governing foundation will make an announcement on the mainnet launch of B3 at a later time. When asked if B3 would introduce its own token in addition to the mainnet, Xu stated that the governing foundation would make that determination.
We were naturally thrilled to collaborate with NPC Labs on their aim to enhance the Base ecosystem with B3, given the popularity and success of Base. Pantera Capital general partner Franklin Bi stated in a statement. B3’s tools and infrastructure will enable developers to create amazing games and on-chain experiences for players, adding a new level of depth to Base.
Five individuals work at the U.S.-based NPC Labs at the moment, but Xu intends to hire more people in engineering, marketing, and global go-to-market to bring the total number of employees to ten.
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