Justin Kan’s Fractal NFT Launchpad Raised $35M in Seed Funding Round

Justin Kan, the co-founder of Twitch and the founder of San Francisco-based new NFT launchpad and marketplace Fractal, has announced that it has raised $35 million for the platform that allows users to buy, trade, and sell NFTs. The seed financing round took place recently, seeing participation from well-known companies in the blockchain industry like Solana Labs and Animoca Brands. The financing round took place two months after launching Fractal to the public on December 30, 2021.

The funding round was led by Paradigm, and Multicoin Capital, along with the participation of several companies, including Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca Brands, Coinbase Ventures, Play Ventures, Position Ventures, Crossover, Shrug Capital, and many more. Fractal closed the round at $35 million from the finest investors in the crypto gaming market.

Paradigm’s Matt Huang will join the company board in the coming days. The fractal team has decided to hire more engineers and recruit game developers to grow the marketplace and a vibrant ecosystem for crypto gaming.

“The Fractal team is supporting games that are creating truly open, decentralized economies,” said Mable Jiang, partner at Multicoin Capital. “Just like free-to-play games launched a new business model for gaming over a decade ago, we believe that blockchain will enable a paradigm shift to the models for games of the future.“

What is the Fractal marketplace?

Fractal is an open NFT marketplace for buying, discovering, and selling NFTs on the Solana network. It helps create an ecosystem where game companies list NFT drops and game assets for players to buy. Players can search for NFTs, buy them, and resell too. The Fractal Marketplace is positioning itself as the first primary marketplace for Solana gaming NFTs. 

Fractal has already partnered with several projects, including House of Sparta, Tiny Colony, Yaku Corp, Cinder, Nekoverse, Metawana, MetaOps, and Psyker. Every mint that Fractal has launched is sold out, and the mint with Tiny Colony sold over $2M of NFTs.

The main aim of Fractal is to create a marketplace dedicated to game-related NFTs and provide top-notch transparency and security through the blockchain. It also aims to reduce dependence on existing game marketplaces and pave the way to disrupt the current ecosystem.

Key features of Fractal Marketplace?

• Fractal makes key partnerships with gaming studios that directly drop new NFTs on its platform. The NFTs include in-game characters, weapons, lands, and other assets. These partnerships with established game publishers give a boost to the company. Users get the option to interact with developers directly and acquire NFTs.
• Fractal solely focuses on gaming NFTs, unlike other NFT marketplaces, as the team believes blockchain technology will form the core role in gaming in the future. Justin Kan said that there might be marketplaces for gaming and software specifically in the future instead of providing marketplaces for everything.
• Fractal helps developers launch NFTs ahead of launching the game. It rewards people who participate in early gameplay.
• Fractal ensures all projects undergo a verification process to weed out fake sales and inflated supplies. It also provides necessary tools to make minting of NFTs easier, affordable and accessible.

What is the difference between Fractal and OpenSea?

OpenSea is the world’s largest NFT marketplace; however, it does not cater to any particular domain. It provides NFTs for all platforms and domains. On the other hand, Fractal is more specialized in distributing gaming NFTs on the Solana network.

With OpenSea just adding support for Solana NFTs, Fractal could see some of its secondary market volume decrease a bit, but the launchpad feature of Fractal is a great asset. All the partner projects are vetted by the Fractal team, making it a great source for finding serious upcoming projects in the Solana ecosystem.

Fractal is also running gaming tournaments. At the moment, there is an ongoing challenge on the FPS ev.io. Players must survive at least 10 minutes in a custom map made for the event. Check it out here!

How to use the Fractal Marketplace to buy an NFT?

• Visit the official website find the NFT you would like to buy and just click on “Buy Now.”
• Connect your wallet at the top right using the dropdown list of wallets. The best wallet for Solana is by far the Phantom wallet.
• To buy an NFT, click on the “Buy Now” button again once you have connected your wallet.
• The price of the NFTs will be displayed in SOL.

How to participate in the Fractal NFT Launchpad?

We all know it is always best to be early in a project. The Fractal NFT launchpad features exclusive mint events for the projects they have partnered with. Fractal NFT holders have the priority to get whitelisted for these mints. There are different tiers of Fractal NFTs with different attributes giving different benefits.

These WL only mints are the best way to get yourself into a new upcoming project. Nos gas wars, and, if you are whitelisted and mint at the set time, your mint is guaranteed!

You can check out the Fractal NFTs available on their marketplace. Before you purchase one, check out the different factions and attributes of the NFT and what kind of benefits you can get from them. For more information head over to the Fractal discord server, you will find a very helpful community there.

A gaming enthusiast since childhood. Got attracted to the new concept of crypto-gaming and blockchain and fell in the rabbit hole. Now getting ready to dive deep in the metaverse.