Animoca Brands Led $8M Series A for Burnt Finance

Decentralized NFT auction protocol Burnt Finance has raised $8 million in a Series A to scale its team as it deploys and integrates new chains and product features, the founder of Burnt Finance, who goes under the alias Burnt Banksy, told Blockworks. 

“Over time, we will become an all encompassing multichain hub for NFTs by integrating DeFi functionality which include NFT lending, liquidity mining with staking incentives, fractionalization, and GameFi,” he said. 

The round was led by Animoca Brands and include investments also from Multicoin Capital, Alameda Research, DeFiance, Valor Capital Group, Figment, Spartan Capital, Tribe Capital, Play Ventures, HashKey, Mechanism Capital, DeFi Alliance, Terra and Fantom, among others. 

“We are excited to have Animoca Brands lead our Series A, which will help tremendously as we look to partner with the hundreds of games and guilds within their umbrella,” Banksy said. “A number of prominent guilds and gaming focused VCs also participated in the round, which helps us gain first-hand access to a number of gaming projects,” he added. 

The company began through its “Burnt Banksy” campaign, when Injective Protocol, the Cosmos SDK-based decentralized exchange protocol — which incubated Burnt Finance — bought an original Banksy piece for $95,000 to burn it and broadcast it live on Twitter in March 2021. From there, it created an NFT of the piece and sold it for about 229 ether, or $400,000, at the time on NFT marketplace OpenSea. 

“Despite the successful sale, a number of challenges were faced while holding the auction, from expensive Ethereum gas fees to bad actors manipulating the bidding process,” the protocol said in a statement. “After this experience, it became clear that a fully-decentralized marketplace was needed,” it added. 

The protocol was founded shortly after the stunt in April 2021 and accumulated over 200,000 users on its waitlist to date and launched its non-fungible token auction protocol mainnet on Monday, Burnt Banksy shared.

Burnt Finance’s protocol will allow users to completely control their auctions by enabling the minting and trading of NFTs in a permissionless ecosystem, it said. The platform will support NFTs, digital assets, among other items and can transact quickly with minimal fees due to its creation on Solana’s architecture.

The protocol plans to expand its product offerings into initiatives like lending or GameFi in the coming months. “We already have a few collaborations in the works with major GameFi platforms which will go live in the next month or so,” Burnt Banksy said. However, he could not disclose additional details about those product plans. 

Burnt Finance raised $3 million in a seed round in May 2021, led by Multicoin Capital and Alameda Research. There is no valuation disclosed at this time due to non-disclosure agreements, Burnt Banksy said. 

“The Burnt team and product vision have both grown significantly since the close of the seed round,” Banksy noted.

“We are now looking to expand onto other chains such as Terra and Fantom while building out new functionalities that bridge the worlds of DeFi with NFTs,” he added. 

Burnt Finance has deployed testnet contracts into layer-1 protocols like Cardano, but plans to be fully functional on “multiple chains” before the end of 2022, Burnt Banksy said.

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