American Shark Mark Cuban poured money into Vietnamese game startup with NFT application, a new type of technology that made the world “crazy”

Accordingly, this funding round is worth $ 7.5 million, led by Libertus Capital, a British venture capital fund. Some other organizations also participating in this funding round are 500 Startups, Collab + Currency, DeFi Alliance, CoinGecko Ventures and Animoca Brands.

In terms of pouring capital as an individual, in addition to billionaire Mark Cuban, the shark in America’s gameshow Shark Tank, there are also Alexis Ohanian – Co-Founder of Reddit and John Robinson – CEO of 100 Thieves, one of the the world’s most valuable esports company.

Shark Mark Cuban shared about his decision to invest in Sky Mavis as follows: “I think Axie is a great game, very interesting and interesting. It’s a game you can play for hours without getting bored. I am very proud. excited to invest in here “.

Startup Sky Mavis was founded in 2018 by CEO Trung Nguyen and two other co-founders, Aleksander Leonard Larsen and Jeffrey Zirlin.

Trung Nguyen came up with the idea of ​​developing the game Axie Infinity in 2017 after feeling attracted to another blockchain game, CryptoKitties. Axie Infinity is a blockchain game inspired by the globally famous Pokémon game, where players can fight, collect, raise and build a land kingdom for their pets.

Similar to CryptoKitties, Axie Infinity uses NFT (Non-fungible token) technology for development. Literally, with this new technology, virtual items in the game will be unique, cannot be manipulated or copied, and will have high value in the market. Whereas in regular games, virtual items are something that can be infinitely duplicated, easily controlled by the publisher / developer and lose value if the game is closed.

According to Coindesk, NFT’s value-making properties include: indestructible (because the data is stored on the blockchain) and verifiable (because blockchain allows traceability of the product. no need to go through a third party). Besides, NFT is unique and cannot be duplicated, so NFT investors can derive value from this uniqueness, similar to buying and selling collectibles.

In the market, many virtual products using NFT technology have been sold at high prices such as Crossroads Digital Painting for USD 6.6 million, or Nyan Cat painting which was purchased for 600,000 USD.

“Axie Infinity was one of the first NFT projects and we were working on NFT before anyone became interested in this technology,” Trung Nguyen said.

According to Sky Mavis, Axie Infinity currently has 39,000 daily active players and monthly NFT trading volume hits $ 12 million. Data from DappRadar.com shows that the transaction volume on Axie Infinity reached $ 4.4 million in the last 7 days.

Zirlin co-founder said Sky Mavis collects a 4.25% fee per player transaction.

With this fundraising round, worth $ 7.5 million for 10% of the shares, Sky Mavis will use the investment money to increase the size of staff and improve technology, bringing the game Axie Infinity to many people. play over.