BlackPool — $6m to deploy into the Metaverse
Fabric Ventures is thrilled to double down in backing and continuing to build BlackPool into the largest financial actor within the metaverse and gaming economies forming around NFTs. BlackPool has announced a sale from treasury that brought in DIGITAL, Bitkraft, Delphi Digital, Play Ventures, Backed and Cherry Ventures as new investors.
The most powerful outcomes of NFT / Play-to-Earn gaming is that they create burgeoning economies: swinging the pendulum from one-to-many distribution of goods to many-to-many interactive economies benefiting the players first and foremost.
Early on we realised that as fortunate as we were to be early equity investors in the likes of Sorare and Axie Infinity (Sky Mavis), there was meaningful upside left on the table by not actively participating within their in-game economies: buying NFTs and utilising them as intended in the game to generate yield.
18 months ago we teamed up with Julien Bouteloup and the StakeDAO team to build BlackPool into one of the prime economic actors within in-game economies. BlackPool is a DAO that operates in multiple games, deploying human + financial capital via vertical managers and a growing guild of players spread across the world.
Today BlackPool has grown into one of the two largest gaming guilds by NFT AUM with now $22.5m in NFT assets split across Sorare, Axie Infinity, Cometh, Guild of Guardians, OVR, Aavegotchi, and more.
BlackPool attracts the top managers for each game vertical, bringing in their knowledge & expertise to competitively represent the DAO and maximise the returns of the assets: whether that’s a solo game like Sorare, or a guild based economy that welcomes and benefits from the varied skills of scholars. BlackPool provides broad exposure to NFT assets that generate yield when actively managed, with the intention to cover all attractive in-game economies, present and future.
The full breakdown of assets held by BlackPool can be found here: https://blackpool.finance/metrics
As we manage one of the Sorare collections, we’ve been particularly fascinated by watching the evolution of BlackPool’s Sorare AUM grow rapidly even when denominated in ETH. How many yield focused strategies have seen this level of return against ETH over the past 18 months?
We expect that BlackPool will continue outperforming the general price of NFTs through active utilisation of the assets within their respective games, to produce yield and rewards above and beyond their speculative value.
Nowadays, almost all DeFi investors provide liquidity to the DeFi protocols they have backed. It was a novel idea when we baked it into our first fundraising decks in early 2018 and when we were discussing it at DevCon in Prague 3 years ago with our friends from CoinFund, Multicoin, & Cambrial, but it has become a necessity to get into the best deals today.
We believe in the coming months it will become unquestionable that developers of games and virtual worlds to expect their investors to inject both time and financial capital into their economies, bootstrapping the early marketplaces, and becoming active users of the in-game assets.
