NPC Labs, a GameFi infrastructure startup founded by three former Coinbase employees, has raised $21 million to accelerate game development on Base, the Ethereum Layer-2 network powered by Coinbase. The funding includes $18 million from cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm Pantera Capital. Makers Fund, Hashed, Mirana Ventures and several other investors also contributed, according to VentureBeat's July 22 report, republished on X by NPC.

What's Happening on the NPC Front?

NPC claims to help developers get GameFi projects to market, providing developers with more support than they typically get when dealing with budget-constrained publishers. Daryl Xu, CEO of NPC and former Coinbase business development partner, shared the following statements on the subject:

“After spending years creating a game, developers owe it to publishers to ensure their game is deemed worthy of support, marketing, and distribution, and when they do that, developers give up 70% of the revenue with the risk that the publisher will pull the game if it doesn't bring in enough revenue.”

Xu said such a setup would give control back to game developers and players and commented:

“We want to make it super simple for developers to benefit from being on-chain while helping create fun games for moms in Nebraska.”

Here are the Remarkable Details

To achieve this, NPC; will serve as a key contributor to B3, a layer 3 GameFi-focused blockchain network built on top of Base that will manage transactions, transaction fees, and bridging of in-game assets. NPC stated that this way developers can focus more on delivering fun gameplay.

Viktoriya Hying, the company's operations manager, who, like Xu, previously worked at Coinbase, stated that choosing Base as the infrastructure to build on was an easy choice for NPC. NPC's other founder, Sean Geng, also worked as an engineering manager at Coinbase.

While Base is a latecomer to the Ethereum Layer-2 space, Hying noted that it is well positioned to connect wallets to Coinbase's 100 million user base:

"We want to make it safe and simple by ensuring that everything that comes with crypto is a little scary for the individual user. We want to eliminate the things that make it difficult to have an easy and fun experience."

B3 will also support Ethereum and other Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible blockchain networks.