MetaverseGo Gaming Platform Completes $4.2M Seed Funding Round

MetaverseGo, a mobile gaming platform, successfully completed a $4.2 million seed funding round. The funding round was led by Galaxy Digital’s Galaxy Interactive unit with participation from Delphi Digital, Dragonfly Capital, Mechanism Capital, Infinity Ventures Crypto, Shima Capital, Com2uS, Akatsuki, Ascensive Assets, BitScale Capital, Yield Guild Games (YGG), BreederDAO, Mentha Partners and Emfarsis.

The MetaverseGo company, initially valued at $40 million, is planning to use the money raised in the funding round for software development, securing collaboration with telecommunications companies, and hiring. It was launched in March this year and is based in the British Virgin Islands with the majority of its team working out of The Philippines, a popular play-to-earn region. The platform, set for release “within the next month”, lets users sign up with just a phone number and access games like Axie Infinity and Cyball. The players are then set up with crypto wallets that allow them access to digital assets from guilds such as YGG – with the guilds taking a portion of in-game earnings.  Players can also transfer their earnings to their personal wallets.

Addressing the Challenge of Onboarding for Gaming dApps

According to a Dapp Radar report, 52% of all on-chain activity in Q2 of 2022 can be attributed to gaming dApps. Daily, about one million people play blockchain-based games. While this is an impressive figure from the relatively new world of blockchain-based gaming, it is a far cry from the hundreds of millions who play mobile games daily.

Gaming dApps face a challenge common to most blockchain use case applications and tools – onboarding. For some gamers, the process of choosing a wallet, buying crypto, and using it to buy gaming assets can be quite intimidating.

This is a challenge that MetaverseGo co-founders  Ash Mandhyan, Jake San Diego, and JC Velasquez believe their platform remedies. By creating a wallet and providing access to digital gaming assets, the platform eases players into the world of web 3.

Ash Mandhyan, who has worked at Facebook and TikTok creator ByteDance, compares web 3 onboarding to learning how to drive a car, a process that should not be over-complicated, especially for new users.

“At first, people don’t want to understand how the engine works. They want to first understand how to steer, how to shift gears and how to brake. Then later on, you’ll have a conversation about engine size and combustion and transmission. But if you go and start talking about engine size at the very first conversation, they’ll back out. It’s too much information too soon,” he said.

In-game earnings, available as MetaverseGo credits will be redeemable and possibly used to pay for things such as mobile data and utility bills.