Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb, co-founders of Myspace and Jam City, are on to their next business venture with the launch of West L.A.-based Plai Labs, a Web3 and artificial intelligence-powered social platform.
With a $32 million seed round of financing
led by Andreessen Horowitz that closed on Jan. 13, DeWolfe and Whitcomb are bringing their experience in gaming and social media to the next generation of the internet – Web3 – by intersecting a variety of emerging technologies, including blockchain, artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies. The funding will be used to expand Plai Labs’ team of engineers and designers.
The company’s first product is the blockchain open world role-playing game “Champions Ascension.” Players embark on quests, battle one another and trade digital items. Bringing in the Web3 aspect to the game, players have to purchase their characters in the form of an NFT, or nonfungible token. Players can also buy NFT pets to accompany their characters.
The Prime Eternal Champion NFTs, which were released last February for players to purchase, are priced at approximately $1,159. From this initial drop, 7,622 NFTs were minted — or published — on a blockchain, allowing them to be bought, sold and traded. The total sales volume for these digital assets was about $69,000, according to NFT Stats.
Andrew Chen, Robin Guo and Arianna Simpson, Andreessen Horowitz investors, said in a blog post, “(DeWolfe) and (Whitcomb) have been at the forefront of past eras of technology, and now they are laser-focused on the future. We believe that the future of social networks begins with games, and the best games have strong communities, enticing core gameplay, and robust meta-progression systems that together define how players interact and socialize with each other. Web3 games in particular have the opportunity to create the decentralized metaverse of the future with their distributed infrastructure and focus on empowering players through…
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