An article to understand the game venture capital BITKRAFT Ventures: more than 30 encryption projects have been shot, and 240 million new funds are ready to go
Although it is a bear market, crypto funds are still raising funds against the trend and making market layout. As of the end of March, BITKRAFT Ventures had raised $220.6 million for its second “token fund,” completing 92 percent of the fund’s total funding goal of $240 million. Bitkraft currently manages an e-sports-focused venture capital fund, a general venture capital fund, and two "token" funds with combined assets of about $600 million, nearly a third of which is related to Web3.
BITKRAFT Ventures, which focuses on the field of games and e-sports, was established in 2016. Since 2020, it has been one of the most active investment institutions in the field of games. In 2021, BITKRAFT raised USD 75 million and launched its first token fund to invest in blockchain games and digital entertainment.
More than 20 years of experience in the game industry, led by German e-sports OG
Compared with many native encryption investment institutions, the team of BITKRAFT Ventures generally has more senior vertical field experience from founders to executives.
The founder of BITKRAFT Ventures, Jens Hilgers, is a German entrepreneur who has worked in the game industry for more than 20 years. In 1997, while still a student, Hilgers founded the online PC gaming news portal Gamers.de and the European LAN party Gamers Gathering. In 2000 Hilgers founded Turtle Entertainment GmbH in Cologne, Germany. In the first ten years of the company's development, Hilgers has been the CEO. He not only built it into a well-known e-sports brand, but also made a lot of contributions to the e-sports industry. One of the largest esports organizations.
Hilgers has been the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Turtle Entertainment GmbH since 2010, and the Modern Times Group purchased a US$86 million equity stake five years later. Additionally, Hilgers founded esports startup Bayes (formerly Dojo Madness) and co-founded esports club G2 Esports, which has grown into one of the world's leading and recognizable esports teams.
In 2021, BITKRAFT hired Piers Kicks to lead the company's business in the crypto ecosystem and help manage the $75 million crypto/Gamefi fund. Piers is a founding partner in the investment arm of cryptocurrency research firm DelphiDigital and leads the firm's gaming division. With this special relationship, the two companies are able to work closely together and combine extensive experience and expertise in both the traditional gaming space and the crypto industry. In addition, he is also a board member of the Blockchain Game Alliance, and has provided encryption and blockchain business consulting to well-known game companies such as Activision, Riot, and Zynga.
In 2022, GGWP co-founder Dennis Fong and Polygon Studios CEO Ryan Wyatt joined BITKRAFT as partners. GGWP is an AI-powered game and content moderation solution, and Fong is also an active angel investor with more than seven unicorns in his portfolio. Polygon, a Web3 and blockchain development platform, is positioned as the "Swiss Army Knife" of Ethereum's expansion scheme, known as the hexagonal warrior. Wyatt also said that he will bring his experience in building the creator economy for more than a decade to the BITKRAFT Ventures team and its portfolio companies.
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Encryption a key enabler of 'synthetic reality'
BITKRAFT believes that, just like the composability exhibited by ecosystems like Ethereum, the blockchain will achieve compound innovation faster than the early Internet.
BITKRAFT coined a term called "synthetic reality" to denote the fusion of the physical and digital worlds. Therefore, it has been investing in professional fields such as AR and VR for many years, such as AR technology companies Magic Leap, Metaio, HoloLens, etc. And BITKRAFT entered the Web3 game industry and began to work on the combination of cryptocurrency and games because they believed that this would become an important driving force for the realization of "synthetic reality": the blockchain enabled a new paradigm of digital ownership, And is unlocking a new generation of user acquisition strategies, business models and experiences.
In an interview with the game and technology media GamesBeat, Hilgers said that there are two main reasons why BITKRAFT is excited about the entire encryption and blockchain field. First, through tokens, game companies can fund themselves in a new way, which drastically changes the way things work; second, significantly influenced by blockchain technology, a whole new set of functions and Features change the way game developers operate, build, scale, and service games.
According to a research article by BITKRT, Web3 will be the next major paradigm shift in gaming, leading to billions of new users on-chain. Specifically in terms of game development, BITKRAFT believes that game developers will be more inclined to use an ecosystem based on the Move language. As mentioned in the article, the data structure in Move is more similar to the ECS (Entity Component System) model that game developers are used to. In several exchanges with game developers in the Move ecosystem, many people said that it is relatively simple to bring Rust developers into the Move ecosystem. However, the reality is that the number of smart contract developers today is very small. Whether Move can recruit new developers from outside the blockchain industry is a major test for the entire field.
In addition, BITKRAFT believes that as the technology required to build games on the chain continues to evolve, cross-chain interoperability solutions will be a very interesting area. Teams like Lootverse, Dark Forest, and others have directly reinvented the way games are built, putting the power of creation directly in the hands of the community, and encouraging interoperability, composability, and scalability. However, BITKRAFT is cautiously optimistic about the degree of interoperability in the future. They judge that all game assets in the "Ready Player One" metaverse can flow freely to other places and easily interact with countless environments, items and other players. The goals are unrealistic, at least not for the foreseeable future. "We need to address considerable technical, social coordination and commercial hurdles to see interoperability at any scale beyond strategic partnerships between a few projects."
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BITKRAFT Ventures' Crypto Portfolio at a Glance
Alethea AI
Build a scalable AI infrastructure for NFTs, making NFTs animated, interactive, and intelligent through Open AI Foundation's GPT-3 technology, a learning AI that shapes natural language responses to queries . Its smart NFT (iNFT), Robot Alice, sold at Sotheby's for $478,800.
AMGI Studios
An independent animation technology company focused on the animation and gaming space to develop and produce traditional entertainment and Web3-native properties by using proprietary technology and real-time animation innovation.
Avalon
Focused on creating a permissionless MMORPG world powered by UGC gaming tools that allow the development of AAA-quality code-free games using blockchain-based economic infrastructure.
BAYZ
A new game guild based in Brazil invests in NFTs in chain games and brings players into the metaverse. YGG is also its main investor.
BlackPool
The first decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) specially established for NFT games and transactions, and the first quantitative hedge fund on the digital asset chain, managing a series of assets from sports cards to game items to digital art.
Block Born
A technology and content creator that aims to bring decades of experience in cross-platform game development to the blockchain ecosystem, with the mission of being the pioneer of the next wave of gaming GameFi.
BLOCKLORDS
The developer of the Web3-based medieval MMO strategy game is MetaKing Studios. The project received US$15 million in financing in May 2022. Other supporters include Animoca Brands, Shima Capital, etc.
Bright Star Studios
A blockchain game developer, its MMORPG Ember Sword combines DeFi revenue with NFT ownership, allowing users to easily access game content through a browser without wallet integration.
Burn Ghost
A casual RMG (Real Money Game) game platform and NFT marketplace.
Carry 1 st
Web3 and social game publisher Carry 1 st, with its monetization-as-a-service offering Pay 1 st a16z.
Civitas
An economy-based game similar to Eve Online, set in a huge world system.
Community Gaming
E-sports tournament platform utilizing blockchain technology for rewards and payments. Its backers also include SoftBank Group, Hashed, etc.
CyBall
The football-themed NFT game will adopt the "P2E" mechanism.
Disco
Provide users with on-chain identities, providing interoperability and self-government power without compromising privacy.
Epic Games
A large traditional game developer and publisher, whose game store currently has 5 encrypted games listed, and plans to list nearly 20 encrypted games by early 2024.
Horizon Blockchain Games
A startup company focusing on Web3 game development, which owns web3 game development platform Sequence, flagship game Skyweaver, and decentralized market Niftyswap.
Immutable
The parent company of ImmutableX, the Ethereum NFT layer-2 expansion solution, is one of the first choices for multiple Web3 game projects to migrate or start. It will cooperate with Polygon Labs to create Immutable zkEVM.
Laguna Games
A studio focused on the field of encrypted games, its first NFT game Crypto Unicorns will be launched in 2022.
Legacy Labs
A studio focused on the crypto gaming space is building a series of NFT-themed competitive free-to-play games.
Luxon
A subsidiary of South Korean publisher Line Games, it is a blockchain game platform that aims to bring traditional games into the Web3 ecosystem.
The on-chain game developer community is advancing the development of infrastructure, composable games, and DApps to expand the gaming space of the StarkNet ecosystem.
MetalCore
The first Web3 massively multiplayer online (MMO) fighting game, developed by Studio 369, combines the engagement of traditional games with true asset ownership and NFT mechanics.
NFT Bank
An NFT dashboard and portfolio management platform that tracks portfolio performance, estimates NFT valuations, enables social interaction between collections, provides market analysis, and automates tax filing.
OFF
NFA technology developer, which allows any avatar to be minted as NFT and used in various forms of media, including recorded short videos, real-time video calls, etc.
Ola GG
Hispanic blockchain gaming community, providing users with Web3 products and education.
Playmint
Developer of blockchain technology and web3 primitives, launched The Crypt, the first on-chain cooperative PcE game.
Sipher
A casual fighting and exploration game with the ultimate goal of creating an open world social experience, all built on the Ethereum blockchain.
RSTLSS
London-based digital fashion brand that enables traditional brands to seamlessly access the metaverse in a scalable manner while controlling their IP through the application of NFT.
Skrice
Mavia, developed by Web3 Game Studio, is a blockchain-based multiplayer strategy game. Players can compete with other players for resources and game currency by building bases and armies.
Spruce
Provide safe and convenient development tools for users to share real data, and its cross-platform toolkit is used to handle cross-blockchain identity and data standards.
Yield Guild Games
The chain game guild built in the form of DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) brings players together to obtain digital assets such as NFT from chain games to obtain benefits.
CCP Games
Founded in 1997, the game developer plans to create a new triple-A blockchain game based on its flagship game Eve Online.
Jungle
Brazilian Web3 game studio Jungle, whose first game is a web3 shooter, will be released on mobile devices this year.
