A GameFi infrastructure startup founded by three former Coinbase employees, NPC Labs, has raised $21 million to accelerate game development on Coinbase-supported Ethereum Layer-2 network Base. The fund includes $18 million from cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm Pantera Capital. According to a July 22 report from VentureBeat reposted by NPC on X, Makers Fund, Hashed, Mirana Ventures, and several other investors also contributed.
What’s Happening at NPC?
NPC claims to help developers launch their GameFi projects and provides more support than they typically receive from budget-constrained publishers. NPC’s CEO and former Coinbase business development partner Daryl Xu shared the following insights:
“After spending years creating a game, developers owe publishers for support, marketing, and distribution, and if the game doesn’t generate enough revenue, they risk losing 70% of the profits if the publisher pulls the game.”
Xu stated that such a setup would return control to game developers and players, adding:
“We want to make the benefits of being on-chain extremely simple while helping developers create fun games for moms in Nebraska.”
Here Are the Key Details
To achieve this, NPC will serve as one of the main contributors to B3, a GameFi-focused blockchain network built on top of Base that will manage transactions, transaction fees, and the bridging of in-game assets. NPC stated that this would allow developers to focus more on distributing fun gameplay.
Viktoriya Hying, the company’s operations manager who also previously worked at Coinbase, said that choosing Base as the infrastructure to build on was an easy decision for NPC. Another co-founder of NPC, Sean Geng, also worked as an engineering manager at Coinbase.
Although Base is a late entrant to the Ethereum Layer-2 space, Hying noted that it is well-positioned to connect wallets to Coinbase’s 100 million user base:
“We want to make everything that comes with crypto safe and simple for the individual user by eliminating the things that make it difficult to have an easy and fun experience.”
B3 will also support Ethereum and other Ethereum Virtual Machine-compatible blockchain networks.
