The stalwarts of the established world of gaming are coming to web3. Whether they do it out of fear of missing out or out of genuine trust in blockchain technologies, this trend appears to be irreversible, at least for now, as investments in the industry continue.
Oasys, a Japan- and Singapore-based startup building a blockchain for gaming developers, has just raised $20 million. The round was led by Republic Capital with participation from JumpCrypt, Crypto.com, Huobi, Kucoin, Get.IO, BitBank and Mirana Ventures.
Instead of a traditional equity round, capital came in a private token sale, which “does not dilute the equity of our project, which we strongly believe in” and “allows us to reach a wider base of backers than traditional equity fundraisers.” , Oasis director Daiki Moriyama tells TechCrunch.
The founding team is deeply rooted in the Japanese gaming industry, but chose Singapore as the firm’s other home because Japan has “regulatory issues regarding cryptocurrency assets,” says the executive. Singapore has emerged as a crypto hub in Asia in recent years.
Some of the biggest hurdles facing blockchain-based applications are slow transactions and high gas fees, the costs incurred when transactions are added to the blockchain. Infrastructure developers such as Solana, Avalanche and Polygon are trying to make blockchain services more scalable.
Oasis, only five months old, shares the same goal. Moriyama suggests that for most games to be “fun” or “good” on a blockchain, they need to be highly scalable with high transaction speeds and low or zero gas fees for users.
With a focus on blockchain gaming, Oasis has attracted a list of household names in the gaming world as “verifiers” on its blockchain. The network uses a “proof-of-stake” consensus mechanism, a less energy-intensive alternative to the “proof-of-work” method used in the bitcoin chain. In PoS, a validator “stakes” his token into the network and is responsible for ensuring that the data saved in the network is valid.
Oasis’s early validators included Banda Namco Research, a research arm under the Japanese entertainment conglomerate; SEGA, a Japanese console giant; French Games Group Ubisoft; South Korean video gaming companies Netmarble, Wemade, and Com2uS; As well as Yield Guild Games, an a16z-backed organization in the Philippines that lets users play games to earn tokens that can be redeemed.
Eventually, Oasis hopes to allocate more governance power to its community and transition to what is called a decentralized autonomous organization. Unlike a traditional corporation with a board of directors that shapes the direction of the firm, a DAO has no central authority and relies on blockchain-based smart contracts to execute decisions agreed upon by the community.
With the new financial investment, Oasis plans to strengthen partnerships with game developers, digital asset exchanges and others in the gaming and crypto industry. This money will also be spent on marketing, business development and hiring. The company has approximately 20 employees in Singapore, Japan, South Korea and the US.
When asked about Oasis’s potential collaboration with crypto exchange investors, Moriyama explains, “There is inherently a firewall between the investment team and the listing team, but the fact remains that the investment team has deemed us worth investing in, The listing is likely to be highly valued by the resulting team.”
Oasis is actively working to list its tokens on several crypto exchanges.
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