Binance Smart Chain (BSC) and Animoca Brands are launching a $200 million investment program to accelerate and incubate early crypto gaming startups that are building on BSC.

BSC and Animoca Brands are co-investing up to $100 million each, which will be utilized to accelerate shortlisted game projects in the multi-billion dollar crypto niche of GameFi, the companies said in a statement on Monday.

“Gaming is one of the strong pillars of Web 2.0, reaching billions of users. Its large-scale real life use case makes it one of the core focus areas for crypto’s mass adoption to onboard retail consumers into the Web 3.0 world,” said Gwendolyn Regina, Investment Director at Binance Smart Chain.

“With this co-investment, projects building on BSC will get the opportunity to gain insights and expertise from leading gaming giants such as Animoca Brands, along with collaboration opportunities with blockchain experts from the BSC Community. We look forward to working together with GameFi projects to build next-gen scalable blockchains and onboard the next one billion new users into crypto,” she added.

Animoca Brands Executive Chairman said early GameFi projects require funding to build their products, and need industry expertise for open-world gameplay and tokenomics, as well as networking opportunities to establish growth in the blockchain gaming and open metaverse, and this investment program will provide these necessities to the projects that they think have the potential to take blockchain mainstream.

Animoca Brands is a major name in blockchain gaming and the open metaverse. Its subsidiaries include The Sandbox, Blowfish Studios, Quidd, GAMEE, nWay, Bondly, Lympo, and various others. It has a large portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships, including investments in over 100 of the most promising NFT-related companies and projects such as Axie Infinity, OpenSea, Dapper Labs (NBA Top Shot), Bitski, Harmony, Alien Worlds, and Star Atlas.

BSC is one of the largest blockchain ecosystems with over 2.1 million daily active addresses in the past weeks. In 2021, games and play-to-earn opportunities on BSC have gone through a significant uptick in traffic and unique wallet interactions.

It currently bolsters an ecosystem of crypto games including RPGs, strategy-battle arenas, sports, digital entertainment, adventure story-based, logic, creative, and social games. The majority of BSC-based gaming projects have developed NFT marketplaces and play-to-earn models with fungible tokens and/or NFT rewards. These GameFi projects have the potential to emerge as metaverses with their own inbuilt economy.

Animoca Brands’ subsidiary Quidd token raises $5M from Binance Smart Chain Growth Fund and others