At the end of August, the SEC (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) took action against an NFT project for the first time in history, accusing the NFT project Founder's Keys of conducting unregistered crypto asset securities issuances. This has also brought the regulatory compliance path of NFT projects into the spotlight again, and the already sluggish NFT market has instantly seen more discussions about uncertainty.
But at this time, one NFT project bucked the trend and attracted tens of millions of dollars in financing.
On September 11, Animoca Brands announced that it would raise US$20 million by issuing new ordinary shares at a price of A$4.50 per share to accelerate the development of its PFP-type NFT project Mocaverse. As part of the financing, Animoca Brands issued free additional utility token warrants to investors based on a 1:1 USD ratio.
According to information on the Animoca Brands official website , this round of financing is Mocaverse’s first round of financing. Behind this financing is CMCC Global, which leads the investment, as well as institutional investors such as Kingsway Capital, Liberty City Ventures, GameFi Ventures, Sky Mavis founder Aleksander Larsen, Yield Guild Games founder Gabby Dizon, and Koda Capital.
It is reported that the new funds will be used to promote the Mocaverse project, including product development, promoting Web3 adoption and ensuring partnerships, in order to expand Animoca Brands' layout in the Web3 field. Since its birth at the end of last year, Mocaverse has carried many expectations of Animoca Brands, and its development has also experienced some setbacks. What are the characteristics of the Mocaverse project? What does Animoca Brands hope to achieve? BlockBeats breaks it down in this article.
Animoca Brands’ entry into the Metaverse?
Mocaverse embodies Animoca Brands’ desire to expand users in the crypto industry and create a portal to the metaverse.
Financing for the first time to create a “portal”
The Mocaverse project has been online for nearly 10 months, but this financing is the first round of financing. Martin Baumann, co-founder of CMCC Global, who led the investment, said: "After establishing a long-term relationship with Animoca Brands, we are delighted to lead Mocaverse's first round of financing. This project will unify Animoca Brands' unique portfolio of companies , and will become the gateway for hundreds of millions of new users to access the Web3 and Metaverse ecosystem."
Yat Siu, co-founder and executive chairman of Animoca Brands, also noted: "We are deeply honored by investors' support for Animoca Brands and its decentralized vision. The continued development of the Internet involves moving from a hierarchical power structure to an autonomous power structure. transformation. Mocaverse, developed based on DAO, can ensure that its community will focus on driving innovation and collaboration in the broader Animoca Brands ecosystem. In addition to building a vibrant community that allows users to participate in creating new economic opportunities, Mocaverse It will also serve as a digital identity, reputation and loyalty system for other decentralized organizations.”
"Portal" is the key word for the formation of Mocaverse.
Create IP and metaverse entrance
In fact, as early as 2021, BlockBeats had an exclusive interview with Xiao Yi. At that time, Xiao Yi pointed out that IP is the entrance for people to enter the blockchain industry or the encryption world. As Animoca Brands’ native NFT project, Mocaverse will naturally become the entrance to the Animoca Brands ecosystem and metaverse.
Related reading: " BlockBeats' exclusive interview with Animoca Brands founder Xiao Yi: IP is the entrance for people to enter the virtual world "
As a company that started out as a game, Mocaverse shows Animoca Brands’ strong gaming genes on its official website interface.
Xiao Yi founded Animoca Brands in 2014. It started as a mobile game developer and holds more than 300 IPs including Doraemon, Ultraman, and Garfield. At the end of 2017, Animoca Brands officially entered the encryption industry. It currently owns original games such as "The Sandbox", "Phantom Galaxies", "Life Beyond", "Crazy Kings" and "Crazy Defense Heroes", as well as The Sandbox, Blowfish Studios, Quidd , GAMEE and other subsidiaries.
On December 15, 2022, Animoca Brands officially announced the establishment of Mocaverse as its PFP-type NFT project. According to the official website of Mocaverse , Mocaverse aims to build Web3 native tools to enhance the capabilities of products in the gaming, culture and entertainment vertical fields, allowing users to create their own digital identities, accumulate reputation, earn and spend loyalty points, and use their digital identities Access the Animoca Brands ecosystem.
What are the characteristics of Mocaverse that make it a key project for Animoca Brands?
Sold 5.5 million US dollars in 2 days, focusing on social networking and gaming
Backed by Animoca, it has attracted a lot of attention since its release.
In January 2023, Animoca Brands announced the specific access rules for Mocaverse - institutional and retail investors of Animoca Brands, employees of Animoca Brands and its subsidiaries, management teams of companies in the Animoca Brands Web3 portfolio, cooperation of Animoca Brands Partners and Mocalist members have the opportunity to participate in the minting of Mocaverse's NFT (MocaMint).
In the same month, Animoca Brands opened Mocalist registration and received more than 1,000 qualified registrants within half an hour. Brian D. Evans of BDE Ventures also joined.
After registration opens, holders of Mocaverse NFT can enjoy some exclusive offers and benefits from Animoca Brands, such as exclusive participation in company events, masterclasses and seminars. At the same time, holders will also have priority access to information about new project launches, and have exclusive access to Animoca Brands' Web3 platform. In addition, NFT holders will also receive Moca XP Tokens, and holders can stake and use these tokens within the community to earn rewards or participate in activities.
On March 9, the official website of Animoca Brands stated that Mocaverse’s MocaMint has been completed, and participating members have minted a total of 8,888 MocaMints. In the first 48 hours, MocaMint’s sales reached 3552 ETH (about 5.5 million US dollars).
It can be said that Mocaverse, backed by Animoca Brands, has attracted a lot of attention from the beginning.
Join hands with CyberConnect and Rarible to build an NFT ecosystem
In the days that followed, Mocaverse joined hands with CyberConnect and Rarible to jointly build an NFT ecosystem.
On June 15, Mocaverse cooperated with the open source cross-chain NFT protocol Rarible to launch a customized NFT market "Mocaverse Marketplace", which can trade verified Mocaverse NFTs. It is worth noting that Mocaverse Marketplace does not charge platform fees for transactions on Mocaverse.
When Rarible was launched in 2019, it was considered one of the “most well-known” projects in the NFT industry. When working with Mocaverse, Rarible co-founder and chief strategy officer Alex Salnikov said that in order to "create innovative brands with higher levels of community engagement" and achieve "long-term growth and prosperity," each community needs to "have its own unique identity." , a home that is safe and does not rely on third-party policies.”
On August 15, Mocaverse partnered with CyberConnect to build a decentralized social layer. The latter's smart account infrastructure CyberAccount provides support for Mocaverse's identity layer, providing Animoca Brands companies with the opportunity to build their own social graphs and enhance Interoperable user experiences across games, products and services.
CyberConnect is considered one of the crypto industry’s current leading social networks, while CyberAccount is the crypto industry’s first scalable and thoroughly vetted ERC-4337 powered smart account. As of August 2023, the CyberConnect protocol has 1.2 million user profiles and 400,000 active wallets executing more than 16.3 million transactions every month. Its native social application Link3 has 940,000 monthly active users.
According to the official website of Animoca Brands , Mocaverse’s cooperation with CyberConnect has a certain basis in reality: “Although existing wallet or account solutions such as MetaMask allow developers to leverage the native user base of the encryption industry, they lack some capabilities to enable developers to deploy better Personalized user experience. Through the social graph deeply integrated with the user's CyberAccount, developers can better develop decentralized applications, thereby significantly shortening the time to bring products to market and covering a wider user group. Animoca Brands aims to increase adoption using this "super account" approach and provide developers with a first-of-its-kind user onboarding solution. "
Conclusion
The official website of Animoca Brands shows that Mocaverse will soon launch the NFT series Moca ID, which is designed to allow users to create their own identity on the chain and participate in the Mocaverse ecosystem. It is reported that Moca ID holders will receive exclusive access to the Mocaverse ecosystem experience and receive "loyalty points" after active participation. At the same time, Mocaverse has also established the Moca DAO community to strengthen co-creation.
It is not difficult to see from these measures that Mocaverse is working hard to connect the upstream and downstream of NFT and build a more complete and integrated ecosystem. Mocaverse strives to build an ecosystem that integrates games, social networking, and transactions, with themes of education, games, architecture, and charity, as Animoca Brands' entrance to the crypto world. Mocaverse also calls the participants in this ecosystem "Mocas" and divides them into 5 tribes: Dreamers, Builders, Angels, Connectors and New Capitalists.
Currently, users can mint their NFTs using the following Tokens on the Ethereum mainnet (ERC-20): ETH, USDC, APE, SAND, ASTRAFER, BONDLY, GMEE, REVV, TOWER, PRIMATE, DOSE, PROS, QUIDD. According to Opensea data, as of the time of writing this article, the total trading volume of Mocaverse has reached 8346 ETH, the floor price is 0.78 ETH, and there are 2102 NFT holders.
Dune data shows that in the past three months, the average daily trading volume of the NFT market has shown an overall downward trend, except for an increase at the end of June and early July. Now backed by Animoca Brands, Mocaverse has raised US$20 million in its first round of financing. What is certain is that if Mocaverse persists in building a complete NFT ecosystem and lays a solid foundation for development, it will surely achieve steady and long-term development.
