Who Will Build the Infrastructure for Game NFTs?
Fabric is thrilled to be co-leading Earn Alliance’s $4.75m Seed raise alongside CoinFund, with participation from Animoca Brands, Blockchain Co-investors, Stake Capital (StakeDAO, BlackPool), and MAD World Ventures.
Blockchain gaming has born economies with complex value flows, which opens up the opportunity for various economic actors, in addition to regular gamers who play for fun. This is not a new concept, think gold farmers and power levelers in World of Warcraft. The difference is that now these are no longer shady grey market service providers, but fundamental contributors to the game economy.
At the moment we call these actors “guilds” and “scholars”, though the meaning of these words are pretty loose and can span anything from scholarship providers (as the OG YGG was), to investment funds (as YGG, Blackpool, and many others became), to questing providers (as YGG and GuildFi are heading) to marketplace builders (Merit Circle), or even asset generators (BreederDAO). Broadly, guilds are communities of gamers that may provide any number of services to games, not least an audience of players (as guilds originally were in MMOs — groups of players who play together).
In order to provide these services there are various universal infrastructures required:
- Identity and game achievement history (badging and soul-bound NFTs)
- Discovery (social graphs)
- Content (creation and sharing)
- Distribution (game directories)
- Automation (breeding/asset utilisation)
- Payments (distributing earnings)
- Asset management (redistributing assets between players)
- Liquidity provision (leasing NFTs)
A key question is who builds this infrastructure to enable guild services?
- Game studios? (who specialise in new economically complex and fun experiences, and are resource constrained as it stands trying to do just that when great games take years to build)
- Guilds? (who specialise in community and generating yield)
- Gamers? (who just want to play)
- Or a 3rd party tooling provider?
It seems remiss for every individual guild and every individual game to build the same tools, so we believe that there is an opportunity for neutral 3rd parties to provide the infrastructure to all guilds and games, leaving them to compete on their already challenging respective core value propositions: community and gameplay. Axie Infinity’s economy alone showcased over US$100B in trading volume across their combined game NFTs and tokens in 2021 and billions have been invested in web3 gaming with thousands of games expected to launch in the next 2 years. Game developers will need to lean into frictionless adoption for everyone and guilds will need nimble access to game markets and automation for game NFT utilities at scale which is an opportunity for someone to build tooling that can facilitate orders of magnitude more transactions than we have seen to date.
In this endeavour, we came across Coop and his team at Earn Alliance doing just that. With multiple successful exits in the worlds of cloud tooling and mobile gaming, web3 experience in heading up infrastructure at 100x (Bitmex), talent from Blizzard, Binance, and Huobi, and tinkering with Axie tooling automation attracting 20+ guilds and 500k+ assets managed in less than four months, on paper they are the perfect candidates to tackle this. The dedicated hustle and traction we’ve witnessed following the team over the course of this year from bull market to bear gives us full confidence that they will find elegant solutions to game NFT infrastructure.
Next month, Earn Alliance will launch their community platform to unite all actors in blockchain gaming to support each other during the downcycle which includes a game directory, web3 news aggregator, and gamified soulbound NFT badges to help connect the next million gamers to blockchain games and guilds. In parallel, to empower this new community, they plan to relaunch their tools alongside the many games to come in 2023.
We back the boldest technologists & communities at the earliest stages, supporting them throughout their journey and becoming active participants within the networks they are building.
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