$4 million to create broader economic opportunity and social impact for gaming communities.
Fabric Ventures is thrilled to back BAYZ as part of their $4 million seed round, led by Yield Guild Games (YGG) with participation from: BITKRAFT, Delphi Digital, Valor Capital, Ascensive Assets, Arca, Sebastien Borget (The Sandbox), Aleksander “Psycheout” Larsen and Jeff “Jiho” Zirlin (Axie Infinity), Nickev (RumbleKongs and reNFTLabs).
We backed YGG on their mission of arbitraging time rich players and time poor asset owners. We helped build BlackPool, to apply more sophisticated strategies for generating yield from digital assets. And now, expanding on both of these models, we found the perfect match in Matt Rutledge and João Borges, currently expanding this thesis to eSports and content.
For now, play-2-earn is experiencing an excess of potential scholars, competing for a limited number of yield generating assets that require active playing, perfectly demonstrated by how quickly one can recruit a full roster of Axie scholars. With time we expect this imbalance to flip, as the number of assets within each game increases and there are more games that have the potential to generate yield for scholars. As this happens, it will become increasingly competitive to attract the best scholars to your ecosystem, and so guilds will need to differentiate.
The first obvious differentiation is cultural — catering to specific geographies and languages unlocks new communities that other guilds may not have tapped into yet. Of the 200 million people living in Brazil, half are gamers, 15% were left unemployed because of the pandemic, and the remaining wages are falling 20% year on year. BAYZ are committed to creating the resources needed to help these perfect candidates learn about the power of play-to-earn.
The second unique value proposition presented by BAYZ, is their core competence in eSports and building brands around influencers. Matt was the Director of Mobile Gaming at Complexity, one of the first and most prominent eSports organisations in the USA. Joao was the Head of Innovation at INTZ eSports Club in São Paulo. Here, they can provide value to publishers wishing to enter new markets by leveraging a local network of content creators and esports organisations.
With the combination of this approach and the backing of YGG, we have a strong conviction that BAYZ can carve out a name for themselves amidst the backdrop of vanilla guilds.
We back the boldest technologists & communities at the earliest stages, supporting them throughout their journey and becoming active participants within the networks they are building.
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