Twitch Co-Founder’s Gaming NFT Marketplace Expands to Polygon Network
Polygon Labs will also be making a "strategic investment" in Fractal, which aims to "build the future of gaming."
Fractal, the platform for game-related non-fungible tokens (NFT) developed by Twitch co-founder Justin Kan, is expanding into the Polygon network to boost accessibility.
The platform launched on the Solana blockchain in December 2021 and raised $35 million in a seed round backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Solana Labs, Animoca, Coinbase Ventures and others. It now hosts dozens of Web3 games, NFTs and tournaments on its site and offers a suite of developer tools to help onboard new creators.
The company said in a press release that expanding into Polygon will help it "focus on user acquisition and provide the blockchain tooling and financial infrastructure necessary to spur successful game development." Its F Studio product suite will now offer a Polygon-based launchpad, marketplace, tournaments, developer SDK, game launcher and sign-in with Fractal service.
In addition, Polygon Labs, the company behind the Ethereum scaling system, will be making an unspecified "strategic investment" in Fractal to help expand its services. Thirty of Polygon's top games will work with Fractal on a campaign of tournaments and activations to lead-up to the Game Developer Conference in March.
"Inspired by Justin’s learnings from founding Twitch, Fractal’s mission has been to relentlessly support Web3 game developers with everything they need to build the future of gaming," said Robin Chan, co-founder of Fractal. "From user acquisition to blockchain tooling to financial infrastructure, we put the framework in place so they can focus on successful game development."
The move is another win for Polygon as it brings new projects and major companies into its ecosystem. Polygon's recent partnerships with Nike, Reddit and Starbucks have all been successful, and the blockchain lured away one of Solana's top NFT projects, Y00ts, last month with a $3 million grant.