TinyTap, an edtech subsidiary of Hong Kong-based gaming firm Animoca Brands, educational games, has on Tuesday announced that it has raised $8.5 million.

The funding comes from investors including Sequoia China, Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, Shima Capital, Polygon, GameFi Ventures, and others, TinyTap said in a statement.

According to the statement, the funding will be used to support TinyTap’s business expansion and accelerate development in the edtech space.

The investment will enable TinyTap to continue to expand its successful Web2 platform, which already serves over 9.2 million registered members, into an alternative Web3 education system that better values teachers by improving the earning opportunities available to them, and enables parents and communities to support and promote their preferred educational materials.

TinyTap launched its Web3 strategy in 2022 with two successful auctions of Publisher non fungible tokens (NFTs), which generated 243 ETH (approximately $352,000 at times of auction).

Publisher NFTs are a new concept introduced by TinyTap to better empower, reward, and incentivize educational content creators and publishers.

Each Publisher NFT represents co-publishing rights to one TinyTap Course, which is a curated bundle of educational games made on the TinyTap platform by one teacher in one specific subject.

When these NFTs are sold, the proceeds are shared with the Course creators, and the NFT buyers assume the role of co-publishers.

In return for promoting and marketing the associated Courses, the buyers share in the benefits generated from co-publishing efforts.

Since the TinyTap Publisher NFTs were auctioned in the fourth quarter of 2022, the average income to NFT buyers resulting from their co-publishing efforts amounted to approximately 8.2 percent (or 19.7 percent annualized) of the purchase price of the Publisher NFTs.

The Publisher NFT model is therefore able to simultaneously benefit the creators of educational content, the buyers of the Publisher NFTs, and TinyTap.

This frees the creators to focus their efforts on generation of quality content, while TinyTap and the buyers of Publisher NFTs distribute and promote the content.

“Our Publisher NFTs genesis auctions demonstrated that the Web3 community is well suited and willing to support educators and educational content via this new powerful and equitable incentive system,

“By pairing educational content creators with interested promoters, we are able to benefit all parties fairly and take a significant step in our goal to put the power of learning back in the hands of educators, students, and the community,” said Yogev Shelly, Chief Executive Officer of TinyTap.

Yat Siu, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Animoca Brands, said teachers and educators are among the most important content creators and contributors in society, and yet their wages typically do not reflect their critical importance.

“This is why we’re incredibly excited at the Web3 opportunities that TinyTap is exploring in the field of education,

“Having already succeeded in building a Web2 education platform, TinyTap is now supercharging its efforts using NFTs, making it possible for educators to better generate equity from their work and link up with co-publishers who can handle the promotion of their courses, all while offering students enhanced learning materials,” he said.

Founded in 2012, TinyTap is an educational games library with more than 250,000 activities made by educators and publishers including Sesame Street and Oxford University Press.

Games are created using TinyTap’s code-free authoring platform and can be accessed by parents as part of TinyTap’s subscription or sold directly to families as bundles.

A portion of subscription revenue is shared with content creators based on the user engagement generated by their content.

TinyTap is among the top 10 grossing kids apps worldwide, delivering educational content to families in the United States, Canada, Europe, and the Arab world with a focus on young learners (Pre-K to Grade 6), serving 9.2 million registered family members with content created by over 100,000 creators.

Animoca Brands and TinyTap to disrupt education with auction of second set of Publisher NFTs