On Tuesday, Binance Lab announced a $1 million investment in the GameFi metaverse, developed by start-up Star Sharks on Binance Smart Chain.
Star Sharks, Binance enters the metaverse
“Binance is pleased to announce that Binance Labs, the venture capital and incubator of Binance, made a strategic investment in Star Sharks, a community-driven shark metaverse where players, developers, and investors can own, mate, trade the underlying shark NFTs within the ecosystem”.
This is the company’s statement announcing the partnership.
Star Sharks is a GameFi project developed by the Timi Studio group. The group is one of the best known NFT game developers, with millions of active users after only three months of operation.
Specifically, the game that Binance will invest in adopts a dual token economic model, Star Sharks Sea (SEA), and the governance token, Star Sharks (SSS). The SEA token is used in the marketplace and is used as the game’s reward.
With this investment, the largest cryptocurrency exchange enters the GameFi NFT market, an increasingly attractive market for the BSC protocol, as stated by the head of the Binance lab, Chase Guo:
“The Star Sharks team has deep gaming expertise and extensive product design experience. After launching their GameFi platform on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), we believe that Star Sharks will be an important contributor to the development of the gaming sector and therefore benefit all users in the BSC ecosystem”.
The new game is expected to be launched on 21 November.
Gaming and DeFi
DeFi is definitely one of the fastest-growing sectors in the cryptocurrency world in recent months. According to DeFi Pulse, the sector would have a Total Locked Value (TVL) of $92.24 billion as of October 2021, an increase of about $22 billion since July.
And in the DeFi sector, games seem to be one of the most interesting application fields. According to a recent BGA Blockchain Game Report published by DappRadar, there are more than one million unique users of blockchain games, a growth of more than 100% compared to September.
DeFi games with the ability to reward players for certain operations they perform during the game seem to be the key to making them attractive to the many gamers around the world. There are now dozens of start-ups creating new games of this type.
From Axie Infinity, the DeFi game with the most users at the moment, to Decentraland and MOBox, the world of DeFi games seems destined to soon supplant traditional ones, according to Jeff Mei, director of global strategy at cryptocurrency exchange Huobi.
Huobi itself has a $10 million fund dedicated specifically to GameFi’s emerging projects, because “this is going to be a very hot sector”.
