Horizon Blockchain Games, the developer behind the Skyweaver game, has raised $40 million in Series A funding, the company disclosed on Oct. 4. The round was led by Brevan Howard Digital and Morgan Creek Digital, with additional participation from Polygon, Take-Two Interactive, Ubisoft, Xsolla, The Sandbox’s co-founder Sebastien Borget, Sky Mavis and Axie Infinity co-founder Aleks Larsen, among other investors.
With the funds, Horizon plans to invest in Web3 products and scale its operations. Specifically, the company wants to grow its developer stack and smart wallet Sequence, expand the content and reach of the nonfungible token (NFT) turn-based card game Skyweaver, and introduce the semi-fungible token (SFT) marketplace Niftyswap.
Peter Kieltyka, Horizon co-founder and CEO, said the Series A allows the company to "grow the Sequence ecosystem by attracting more builders to our platform via marketing, community, and partnership initiatives."
Based on the Polygon network, Skyweaver enables players to battle each other and earn tokenized cards to trade via its marketplace. The game was launched in February after months of testing for a limited number of players. According to the company, over three million games were played in the private beta and 345,000 people signed up for the waitlist before it went live.
The Niftyswap marketplace is expected to make trading SFTs easier by offering liquidity on-chain. SFT is a token that can be both fungible and nonfungible. Fungible, until they get redeemed, when they lose their value and become nonfungible. It was enabled by the ERC-1155 token standard, which was co-created by Horizon's team.
Related: Solana tech developer Coral raises $20M, plans to launch 'xNFT' protocol
The number of users interacting with blockchain gaming decentralized applications (DApps) increased in September, according to data from DappRadar, with seven of the top 10 games having more "unique wallet addresses interacting with dapp's smart contracts" and all of the top five games posting positive results.
