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Venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has raised $600 million to build the future of the gaming industry.

The firm has been investing in gaming for over a decade, but the new fund will “play a pivotal role in defining how we socialize, play, and work over the next century,” the firm said in a blog post announcing the move.

With the new a16z fund, named “Games Fund One” the team plans on investing on various different themes within the gaming industry. First, investments will be focused on gaming studios. “These ‘games-as-a-service’ have become rich, interactive social networks, with players making in-game friendships that are just as meaningful as those made in-person,” said the blog post, written by general partners Andrew Chen, Jonathan Lai, and James Gwertzman. 

The team will also be investing in player communities.  For example, social apps like Discord and Twitch were created for this purpose. Infrastructure will also be a key focus. 

“With GAMES FUND ONE, we will continue to add more functions and develop deeper networks that are tailored to the games ecosystem so we can help our portfolio companies with everything from building digital communities, to managing their virtual economies, to IP licensing best practices, to helping build their development teams,” the team wrote.

NFT based games peaked in popularity last year, with a recent cool down, according to data compiled by The Block Research.

Gaming startups have still managed to raise significant capital in recent months, many which have been led by a16z. Carry1st, an African gaming startup, raised $20 million earlier this year. At the tail-end of last year, Mythical Games raised $150 million led by a16z. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Meta, formerly Facebook, has submitted five trademark applications in the United States for what appears to be new digital platform dubbed Meta Pay.

The trademark applications, filed on May 13, described Meta Pay as an “online social networking service for investors allowing financial trades and exchange of digital currency, virtual currency, cryptocurrency, digital and blockchain assets, digital tokens, [and] crypto tokens.”

Apart from payment and trading, Meta Pay could also include digital asset lending and investment services, per other details in the trademark filing.

The social media giant previously acquired the MetaPay.com domain name from the South Dakota-based MetaBank in a $60 million deal in December 2021.

The trademark filing is Meta’s latest crypto-related play having announced plans to begin testing NFTs on Instagram earlier this month.

Meta previously filed eight trademark applications for its logo with the company describing the move as part of its pivot towards the digital economy.

These efforts have not gotten to a great start with the company announcing that its metaverse-focused unit Reality Labs lost almost $3 billion in the first quarter of the year.

The company’s Diem stablecoin project also failed to get off the ground amid significant opposition from regulators across the globe. The assets from that initiative were later sold to the US-based bank Silvergate. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The floor price of the popular NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) fell below $200,000 on Wednesday as the NFT market continues to slide. 

BAYC has seen its floor price — a measure of the cheapest NFT in the collection — fall significantly in May. It’s currently at around $198,000, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard. 

The latest drop in prices leaves BAYC’s floor price down by a third in ETH terms and by more than 50% in dollar terms from the beginning of May, when the cheapest Bored Ape was $420,000, according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

The drop in price comes amid a broader market downturn as cryptocurrency prices remained low following the collapse of TerraUSD (UST) last week. During its sudden demise, the Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) was forced to sell its massive bitcoin reserves to protect UST’s peg. While this didn’t save Luna, it added to the downward pressure on bitcoin’s price.

Bitcoin (BTC) is currently trading below $30,000 while ether (ETH) trades just above $2,000. Because Ethereum-based NFTs are valued in ETH, the fall in its price has affected the value of NFTs when measured in dollar terms.

Furthermore, the changing market dynamics has affected not just the floor price but also the volume of sales for BAYC — sales were down by 117, or just over 30%, week-on-week, from May 2 to May 9 according to The Block’s Data Dashboard.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

FreshCut, a short-form video platform for gamers, has raised $15 million in funding to further develop its the platform and onboard more users.

The investment was led by Galaxy Interactive, Aminoca Brands, and Republic Crypto, with participation from Hashed, SkyVision Capital, Tamarack Global, C2X and Polygon.

The app, which integrate the Polygon blockchain, works like a hybrid of TikTok and the video game streaming platform Twitch.  Creators can earn a token that’s native to the platform for uploading their content, and fans can earn the same token for engaging with the clips.

With the fresh funding, the team will focus on developing three specific areas, a representative from the company told The Block. It will be scaling up the firm’s efforts in marketing and onboarding new creators to the platform. There will also be a focus on strengthening FreshCut’s membership program that gives fans both online and real-life perks. And finally, the team will work on product development and integration of the native token.

The founders, James Kuk, Ernie Le, and Ben Stueck, all previously worked for Twitch. “Demand for short-form content has grown exponentially, largely driven by a generational shift in attention and consumer habits,” said Kuk, FreshCut’s CEO. “At the same time, there’s a growing desire for creators and fans to be rewarded for their contributions to the community and platform more appropriately and genuinely,” 

Other investors include co-founder of Twitch Kevin Lin, co-founder of game PUBG CH Kim, co-founder of Friends With Benefits Trevor McFedries, and content creator Jericho.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Hackathon organiser and web3 incentive platform DoraHacks has raised $20 million in a Series B1 round, led by FTX Ventures and Liberty City Ventures.

The funds will be used to accelerate the launch of the Dora Grant DAO, a decentralized grant community, and the Dora Infinite Fund, the company said in a release on Wednesday. The fund will officially launch via an NFT drop later in 2022. 

Circle Ventures, Gemini Frontier Fund, Sky9 Capital, Crypto.com Capital and Amber Group also joined the round.

The raise follows an $8 million strategic round last year, led by Binance Labs, bringing the total amount invested in Dora core infrastructures over the past 18 months to nearly $50 million. 

Since late 2020, DoraHacks has invested in and incubated 20 projects, including DAO-as-a-service infrastructure Dora Factory, zero-knowledge infrastructure Zecrey, play-to-earn Thetan Arena, and web3 tooling infrastructure ETHSign. DoraHacks is also the co-host of the Binance Labs incubation program. 

The raise is the latest in a number of plays made for web3 infrastructure in recent months. Earlier this week, Ikigai Asset Management, a Puerto Rico-based crypto asset management startup, said it had raised $30 million in venture funding for web3 projects. 

Custody tech provider Fireblocks also launched a new web3 platform, with a suite of tools for developers to build DeFi, GameFi and NFT products and services.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Lens Protocol, a network for building decentralized social media, has gone live on the Polygon blockchain.

According to a media statement, more than 50 applications have debuted on Lens Protocol. These include Lenster, Lens Booster, SpamDAO, GoldenCircle, PeerStream, Swapify, Social Link and others. 

The developers of Aave, a popular lending protocol, first introduced Lens in February 2022. Lens is a software stack that enables developers to create decentralized competitors to social media giants like Twitter and Facebook. The idea with Lens Protocol is to facilitate a platform that helps decentralize the ownership of content and user accounts using a blockchain network.

Instead of traditional social media accounts that rely on email ids and a unique username, Lens Protocol makes use of crypto addresses and NFTs for authentication and monetization purposes. This set-up puts users, rather than a centralized company, in control of the content and personal data associated with accounts.

Centralized social media platforms are often criticized for terminating user accounts without offering an explanation. The Aave CEO himself, Stani Kulechov, faced such a suspension recently. In April, Kulechov’s account was suspended over a joke he posted about “joining Twitter as interim CEO.” After his account was restored Kulechov told The Block that these kinds of actions from social media giants had motivated Aave to working on Lens Protocol.

“The social media experience has remained relatively unchanged for the last decade, and much of that is due to your content being solely owned by a company, which locks your social network within one platform,” Kulechov stated on today’s launch.

As such, Lens is trying to achieve censorship resistance for hundreds of social media apps and help them unlock new forms of content monetization with NFTs as well as other blockchain-based crypto assets.

“Building a Web3 social media platform on Lens Protocol has opened up a new realm of possibilities for our development team and users,” said yoginth.eth, the pseudonymous founder of Lenster, a social media app built using Lens Protocol. “With a user-first foundational architecture, Lens fundamentally changes the landscape of social media platforms and user experiences as we know them today.”

Lens will leverage Layer 2 scalability 

Scalability is a big issue for decentralized social media since such products are both data-intensive and involve a high throughput of transactions. Blockchains usually struggle for both of these issues. Even though Polygon was designed for greater scalability, it has still faced congestion in the past from games that have led to surge of activity on the network.

In response to the scalability matter, Kulechov said the protocol will explore other Layer 2 solutions, both on Polygon and Ethereum to meet scaling demands.

“Eventually many networks such as Polygon (and Ethereum) will scale over L2 networks by inheriting the security from the underlying network. That would be the path for Lens Protocol over the long term once there is sufficient protocol marketfit,” Kulechov told The Block.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Terraform Labs CEO Do Kwon has put his Terra revival plan to the vote among holders of the ecosystem’s Luna governance token.

The plan is to fork the current Terra blockchain and allocate amounts of Luna to previous holders according to a set distribution. Many of the tokens would be subject to long vesting periods.

The proposal went live at about 7:30 a.m. ET on Wednesday. An hour later, it had 23.6 million LUNA voting in favor, with 11.3 million against. The vote needs 188 million LUNA in favor to pass.

Kwon said the proposal — which would see the original Terra network renamed Terra Classic – has support from a variety of projects including Nexus Protocol, Stader Labs and Flipside Crypto. 

“If the proposal is successful, a final snapshot will be taken of the Terra Classic network at block 7790000 (2022.05.27 03:59:51+08:00), and a new network will be born,” said Kwon on Twitter.

Yet the community appears to be largely against the proposal, according to comments and votes on preliminary polls on the Terra governance forum. As The Block reported yesterday, one poll shows a clear majority against the idea. At present, the poll has had 6,200 votes, with 92% voting against Kwon’s proposal. This poll was open to anyone who logs into the Terra forum, whether or not they hold Luna, the network’s governance token.

For more breaking stories like this, make sure to follow The Block on Twitter.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

Cryptocurrency exchange Binance said it’s in talks to become regulated in Germany as it engages with regulators across Europe, confirming reports from February that the company was looking to become regulated in the country.

Speaking at the Finance FWD Conference in Hamburg, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao said he was hopeful about the prospect of winning regulated status in Germany. 

“We hope to get a licence in Germany,”  he said. “Our team is definitely talking to regulators and based on secondary feedback the conversations are going well.” 

The talks with German authorities follow the exchange’s approval by French regulators earlier this month. Zhao said that Binance’s push into France – which last month saw Binance announce a €100 million ($105 million) investment into the French web3 ecosystem – doesn’t mean they are ignoring Germany, Europe’s largest economy. 

In France, Binance can now operate its digital asset trading platform, meaning it can facilitate digital asset custody, let users buy and sell crypto and help to exchange digital assets for each other, according to the Autorité des Marchés Financiers (AMF), a French financial market regulator. 

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

LKB & Partners, one of the top law firms in South Korea, has decided to sue Terraform Labs founder and CEO Do Kwon after the sudden collapse of TerraUSD (UST) last week, Korean media reported on Wednesday.

LKB will file the case against Kwon, a Korean national, on behalf of ordinary investors to the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency, according to a report in the Munhwa Ilbo newspaper. Some of LKB’s employees may also join the case since they lost money in the UST collapse, the report says.

“There are related investors inside the law firm, and we will file a complaint against Kwon at the Financial Investigation Unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency,” Kim Hyeon-Kwon, a partner at LKB, told Munhwa Ilbo.

Besides filing a police complaint, LKB has also decided to file a provisional attachment order of Kwon’s properties to seize them in the Public Prosecutors’ Office of Seoul Southern District, according to the report.

A separate report from local news agency Yonhap said LKB is also considering suing Daniel Shin, another Terra co-founder.

The Block has attempted to contact Kwon and Shin via Terraform Labs and will update the story should we hear back.

UST collapse 

The UST algorithmic stablecoin de-pegged sharply last week to levels below 10 cents, far from its target price of $1. It is still trading at that level. Terra’s native token Luna also crashed and is currently trading at a fraction of a cent, losing almost all of its value.

The implosions of UST and Luna have led to tens of billions of dollars in losses for investors, both retail and institutional. Korea’s financial regulators — the Financial Services Commission (FSC) and the Financial Supervisory Service (FSS) — have reportedly launched “emergency inspections” into local crypto exchanges to enhance investor protection.

Korean politician Yun Chang-Hyun has also reportedly called for a parliamentary hearing on UST to understand the cause of the collapse and measures to protect investors. Chang-Hyun wants Kwon and local crypto exchanges to attend the hearing.

In the wake of the UST chaos, Terraform’s in-house legal team has left the company, The Block reported on Tuesday. The Singapore-based firm has turned to outside counsel to assist with legal matters.

Meanwhile, Terraform hopes to amend the situation. Kwon has promoted a plan to fork Terra to create a new blockchain — but the community seems set against the idea.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.

The demise of the Terra blockchain sent a ripple effect throughout the crypto ecosystem last week, as the market absorbed over 80,000 BTC deployed in a failed attempt to keep the UST “stablecoin” pegged 1:1 with the US dollar.

“If you’re a market maker and you don’t make money in those kinds of days, then yeah — you’re doing something wrong,” said Evgeny Gaevoy, CEO of Wintermute — an algorithmic crypto market maker with nearly $2 trillion in cumulative volume, according to the firm’s website.

In this episode of The Scoop, Evgeny Gaevoy recounts the Terra meltdown from a market maker’s perspective, and explains how future decentralized yield-bearing stablecoins can innovate where Terra’s UST failed.

According to Gaevoy, the 20% annualized yield promised to users who deposited UST into Terra’s Anchor Protocol was more debt than could be paid by the protocol’s revenue:

“What was really wrong about LUNA is they had that 20% yield which was coming out of nowhere,” he said. “It was backed by future growth of the protocol, which could have happened, but didn’t.”

Although UST has proven to be a failure, Gaevoy thinks an interest-bearing stablecoin is possible, as long as the promised yield is equivalent to the issuing protocol’s revenue. 

To illustrate, Gaevoy proposed a hypothetical protocol that brings in $500,000 a year in revenue and seeks to raise $5 million through offering interest-bearing stablecoins:

“Let’s say they have cash flows of $500,000 per year — they can issue $5 million worth of stablecoins with 10% yield, and then suddenly they have $5 million and they can pay this yield because they actually generate this income. So they can offset these interest payments with what they generate from their own protocol — that model can work, and that model I think is really interesting to explore for a lot of protocols.”

Wintermute is in the process of launching its own stablecoin, according to Gaevoy, who said the firm “just needs to iron out the regulatory details.”

During this episode, Chaparro and Gaevoy also discuss:

• Angst towards venture capital in crypto
• Collateral damage from the Terra implosion
• The sustainability of inflated crypto valuations
  

This episode is brought to you by our sponsors Fireblocks, Coinbase Prime & Cross River
Fireblocks is an enterprise-grade platform delivering a secure infrastructure for moving, storing, and issuing digital assets. Fireblocks enables exchanges, lending desks, custodians, banks, trading desks, and hedge funds to securely scale digital asset operations through the Fireblocks Network and MPC-based Wallet Infrastructure. Fireblocks serves over 725 financial institutions, has secured the transfer of over $1.5 trillion in digital assets, and has a unique insurance policy that covers assets in storage & transit. For more information, please visit www.fireblocks.com.

About Coinbase Prime
Coinbase Prime is an integrated solution that provides institutional investors with an advanced trading platform, secure custody, and prime services to manage all their crypto assets in one place. Coinbase Prime fully integrates crypto trading and custody on a single platform, and gives clients the best all-in pricing in their network using their proprietary Smart Order Router and algorithmic execution. For more information, visit www.coinbase.com/prime.

About Cross River
Cross River is powering today’s most innovative crypto companies, with banking and payments solutions you can rely on, including fiat on/off ramp solutions. Whether you are a crypto exchange, NFT marketplace, or wallet, Cross River’s API-based, all-in-one platform enables banking as a service, ACH & wire transfers, push-to-card disbursements, real-time payments, and virtual accounts and subledgers. Request your fiat on/off ramp solution now at crossriver.com/crypto.

© 2022 The Block Crypto, Inc. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.