OP Games raises 8.6 million USD from Blockchain investment firms

OP Games, a startup that enables game developers to monetize their work using Web 3.0, raised $8.6 million of seed funding from Blockchain capital firms.

Leading blockchain venture capital firms participated in the round, including Republic Crypto, Ascensive Assets, Morningstar Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Polygon Studios and Bitcoin.com. Additional investment came from Mentha Partners, OKex Blockdream Ventures, SevenX Ventures, GFS Ventures, Defi Alliance and more.

"We welcome this hearty endorsement of the work we have done to power up the gaming landscape using Web 3.0's superpowers: open-source and community ownership," said the startup's CEO and co-founder Chase Freo.

"The $150 billion gaming industry is evolving at an astonishing rate. By giving developers the tools and guidance they need, and by giving players the chance to co-create their favorite projects, we are opening up new revenue channels for the sector's talented creators."

OP Games  is building a platform that combines non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), working with developers to create games that they can collaborate on with their communities.

The platform will incorporate a Play-and-Earn model, a variation on a pillar of the gamefi movement. The company's player-facing gateway is OP Arcade, where communities  discover HTML5 games, compete for prizes in tournaments, and participate in a progressive crypto-economy.OP Arcade is built on the developer-friendly NEAR Protocol.

OP Games  will support the creation of up to 500 games by the end of 2022, nurturing a vibrant community of creators, players and investors.

The venture, created by a team of gaming industry veterans, is launching its genesis NFT project, Arcadians, on October 12.  This inaugural series of Avatars for the OP Arcade platform are built on the open-source tools created by OP Games, and  are one of the pillars of the upcoming OP Games metaverse