Blockchain-based gaming start-up Avalon has raised $13m in a funding round led by Bitkraft Ventures.
Other participants in the round included Coinbase Ventures, Delphi Digital, Hashed and Mechanism Capital.
Founded by a group of experienced game developers comprising former Sony, Microsoft and Blizzard employees, the firm aims to build a digital interoperable universe incorporating games engines and blockchain technology.
The platform built in Unreal Engine 5 will hold multiplayer online games and metaverse elements, however it will not be described as a metaverse per se.
Avalon chief executive officer Sean Pinnock said: “We imagine that a single company can’t build that. Everyone’s kind of leaping onto this phrase and just pounding the poor word to death.
“With Avalon, we’re building an open universe where content producers may construct the worlds they envision. We anticipate that to develop such a thing is extremely tough, if not actually impossible for a single firm to achieve it.”
Alongside Pinnock, the firm’s chief product officer Jeffrey Butler believes it to be game developers – with the required experience in creating triple-A games – that hold the power in bringing the truest version of the metaverse into reality, not consumer brands.
Avalon will act as more than a virtual environment to explore, but rather a platform that allows its users to move money between virtual “worlds” using crypto and NFTs.
As well as the overall objective to make Avalon a triple-A quality game, the firm hopes to collaborate with artificial intelligence companies to eventually allow users to design worlds using its technologies.
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