Sky Mavis raises Series B for blockchain-enabled games

Sky Mavis, the creators of Axie Infinity, have announced a $152M USD Series B round led by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) with participation from Accel and Paradigm. The round will be used to further build out a global team, scale infrastructure, and build their own distribution platform to support game developers to create blockchain-enabled games.

By Kalie Moore

Sky Mavis invented the Play-To-Earn (P2E) concept which has revolutionized how people play, live, work and earn within virtual worlds. Sky Mavis’ first game to introduce this concept is Axie Infinity, a category-defining P2E blockchain-based NFT game where players breed, battle, and trade digital pets called Axies.

Axie has grown to be the largest NFT gaming ecosystem and has amassed players around the world with more than 2 million daily active users logging into the platform in August. Axie Infinity has already achieved $33 million in daily transactions, for a total volume of over $2 billion.

Play-to-Earn revolution

Axie Infinity is an NFT game where players battle, collect, and trade digital pets called Axies. Axie is the first game designed to be owned and governed by the community that plays it. Players have complete ownership over the in-game assets and can generate real-world rewards for their in-game activities. With over 2M daily active players, Axie Infinity has achieved over 2 Bn USD in total transactions as players turn their time and effort into real value.

Play-to-Earn demonstrates how emerging technologies, such as non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies, are providing transformative economic opportunities for communities, especially in developing nations where jobs are lacking and COVID-19 crisis relief has been limited. NFT-based play-to-earn games are decentralized, meaning that the players own the in-game assets that they purchase and can generate real-world rewards for their in-game activities. Axie Infinity has helped create income-generating opportunities for underserved people around the world; 25% of players are unbanked, and 50% have not previously used cryptocurrencies. This level of ownership and accessibility within the Axie economy is upending society and creating an economically viable digital nation.

“Axie Infinity is a category-defining game that is changing history by creating an entirely new digital economy. We are on a mission to create economic freedom for gamers and are making this happen by turning players into owners of in-game assets unlike the traditional model where publishers, distribution platforms and game developers retain control and benefit the most,” shared Trung Nguyen, Sky Mavis CEO.

Breaking with gaming tradition

In traditional gaming, the publishers and the distribution platforms (app stores) have all the power. Sky Mavis is seeking to cut out the middleman and further build out its vision of a community-led digital nation by revolutionizing how games are distributed by building its own platform, The Mavis Hub. The Mavis Hub distributes games on both PCs and Macs, and will seamlessly connect to Sky Mavis’ proprietary Ronin Blockchain, which currently secures over $1.5Bn in assets. In addition to supporting Axie Infinity, The Mavis Hub will support game developers building and distributing blockchain-enabled games.

“Sky Mavis’ marquee game, Axie Infinity, has introduced a new way for anyone to turn their time into money through Play-to-Earn, a new mechanic that allows gamers to transform their skills and time into earnings and distribution rights for tokenized in-game items,” said Arianna Simpson, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz.