THE ON-CHAIN GAMING ECOSYSTEM TODAY

 

The blockchain gaming sector saw significant growth in Q2 2024, with the quarter ending at 2.8 million daily Unique Active Wallets (dUAW), marking a 33% increase from the previous quarter. And while blockchain games represent 28% of all dApp activity in the space, we believe the current on-chain gaming ecosystem is flawed.

 

The user experience is fragmented, leading to a disjointed experience for gamers. Liquidity is fractionalized, hindering the seamless exchange of in-game assets. High overhead costs in Rollup-as-a-Service (RaaS) models make maintenance expensive and complex for developers. Additionally, there is a lack of compatibility with various on-ramps. To address these issues, the ecosystem needs dedicated blockspace, easier deployment processes, greater customization and modularity, and financial support to sustain growth.

 

WHY WE INVESTED IN B3

 

B3 is a horizontal ecosystem of Base L3s powering the next era of on-chain games and addresses the challenges of the on-chain gaming ecosystem with several innovative offerings: 

 

• The B3 Hub serves as an aggregation layer, powering game-specific rollups and settling to the base layer. These rollups are single-purpose, act as their own databases, and are tailored to individual gaming needs, allowing for multi-VM support and infinite scaling. 
  

 

• The Basement.fun discovery layer acts as a game launcher, enabling players to discover and play B3 rollups/games with a seamless cross-chain user experience, all powered by Sygma.

 

• Base is the settlement layer. B3 maximizes transactions per second, allowing for gasless transactions and a simple user experience.

 

• The B3 Gaming SDK provides a robust software development kit with tools to integrate on-chain primitives into games, supporting popular engines like Unity and Unreal. Additionally, B3 offers a library of Tooling, including optimized contracts and APIs for liquidity and user engagement.

 

To succeed in the evolving blockspace landscape, Layer 2 solutions must foster, understand, and capture the growing Layer 3 ecosystem. L3s enhance their respective L2s through sequencer revenues, as their lower transaction costs open up a wide range of applications, driving additional activity and value back to the base L2. They also bring additional liquidity, with competing centralized exchanges and onramps directly interacting with L3s, allowing liquidity to be bridged back to the L2 or other L3s within the same ecosystem. Shared incentives, such as token rewards, serve as powerful motivators for collaborative outcomes, similar to how $OP Grants are distributed to Base builders. 

 

The team behind B3 is qualified to advance critical infrastructure on Base. Daryl, Viktoriya, and Sean, all former Coinbase employees, played pivotal roles in developing Base from its inception.

 

• Daryl Xu, CEO, led business development at Coinbase, where he was instrumental in advancing the gaming and onboarding ecosystems for Base and forging key partnerships with on-chain developers, builders, and Web2 game studios. He also spearheaded staking partnerships that now amount to approximately $10 billion.

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• Viktoriya Hying, Chief Product Officer, also held a business development lead role at Coinbase, where she managed the social and creator ecosystems for Base and played a pivotal role in the launch of Coinbase NFT, collaborating with over 80 top creators and brands.

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• Sean Geng, Chief Technology Officer, was an engineering manager at Coinbase, contributing to both Coinbase Wallet and Coinbase NFT, and is a two-time founder with one of his previous ventures acquired by Coinbase.

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We’re excited to lead B3’s $18 million seed round as they continue building the future of web3 gaming on Base. 

 

If you’d like to learn more about B3, please visit b3.fun.