How the $35M Fractal Just Raised Could Rock the NFT Space (Op-Ed)

The announcement came on April 1, but it was no joke. Neither was the amount raised, $35 million USD, a tidy sum. Justin Kan dropped a hint of what was ahead for Fractal last month, tweeting, “Yeah, I built Twitch, it has millions of users & gaming NFTs are way bigger.”

Ten days before launching the NFT marketplace on Dec 30 last year, Fractal announced the launch, and by the time it went live, the Fractal Discord had accumulated some 107,000 followers, according to Kan in an interview with GamesBeat.

Paradigm and Multicoin Lead $35M Seed Round

Along with Menlo Park, California-based Andreeson Horowitz, Solana Ventures, Coinbase, Animoca Brands, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Zynga founder Mark Pincus, Crossover, Shrug Capital, TerraForm CEO Do Kwon, Tim Ferriss, and the founders of Ramp along with many others joined the round.

Kan, however, took to Twitter to remind stakeholders in the Fractal and NFT community, as well as any start-up entrepreneurs looking on that, “it’s not the size of your seed round it’s what you do with it.” With the crypto market in bloom with echoes of NASDAQ in the late 1990s, it’s an important admonition for both crypto-investors and startups.

Here’s what Kan says Fractal has in the works with the fresh infusion of private capital raised three months from launching:

“Crypto never sleeps. We’re building stuff super fast, very product-driven, it feels like we’re defining how value’s going to be created on the Internet again. So if you haven’t been following along, Fractal is a marketplace for people to buy and sell and discover gaming NFTs. We’ve been hard at work at it for the last three months. It has been going pretty well. We’ve been working with a lot of gaming partners to drop sold out NFT collections, and we have a ton more in the pipeline…”

A press release from Fractal Friday specifies further:

“Fractal is building a trust layer in the web3 gaming ecosystem. NFT marketplaces are still the wild west right now, with many teams failing to deliver on their promises. We are working with the best AAA gaming studios with large communities to bring the coolest game experiences to players.”

He predicts that over the next decade, blockchain assets will enable a bigger shift in online gaming than the deployment of the Twitch platform did. Kan has set a lofty goal of onboarding some 100 million cryptocurrency users by powering its NFT marketplace for blockchain-supported digital gaming assets.

Will Solana-powered Fractal Make as Big a Splash in NFTs as OpenSea?

Fractal is powered by the Solana blockchain, a third-generation blockchain that utilizes proof of stake (POS) to qualify nodes to validate and secure actions on the network. That allows it a high degree of scalability and the ability to handle a large volume of transactions in a trustless peer-to-peer (P2P) network. Its proprietary PoS method is dubbed proof of history (PoH) by Solana.

Protocol’s Tomio Geron reported Friday that Solana’s super-fast blockchain platform needs a killer app to break out into the mainstream, speculating Fractal’s NFT marketplace could be that app. The key to success in this endeavor is quality. VentureBeat’s Dean Takahashi reported Friday that Kan says Fractal carefully vets applications from web3 games, and currently has an acceptance rate of only 5% of applications for their tokens to market on its NFT clearinghouse.

Some notable games currently listing NFTs on Fractal include House of Sparta (real-time strategy), Tiny Colony (multimode), Yaku (racing), and Cinder and Nekoverse (MMO RPG).