CoinFund Leads $2.3M Round for Esports Startup

Picture this: You’ve beat out your competitors and just won the final round during a tournament through a last-second spike attack during a Super Smash Bros game. You’re the tournament winner and more importantly, prize winner. But wait, how will you get paid?

Community Gaming has an answer for that — and they just received $2.3 million in seed round funding led by CoinFund, among others. 

The platform automates esports tournaments through Ethereum mainnet, Binance Smart Chain, and Polygon with fees as low as 1/50th of a penny and uses a blockchain-enabled payment solution to pay out winners immediately and automatically through their connected crypto wallets, according to the company’s announcement.   

The NYC-based startup began in 2019 in hopes to simplify the gaming industry with blockchain technology, and now it’s expanding into new regions thanks to the additional funding. 

The company has received support from major players in both the blockchain and gaming industries, said Chris Gonsalves, CEO of Community Gaming. This investment is the latest pointer that the industry of video games and blockchain are intersecting as non-gaming based companies contributed to the fundraising. 

“The Community Gaming platform is becoming a bridge between the esports and blockchain communities by creating the first comprehensive blockchain-enabled payment solution built for competitive gaming. We’re proud to be introducing this tech to thousands of gamers each month, most of which have never created a wallet before,” Gonsalves said to Blockworks. 

Big investors behind the funding include Animoca Brands, Dapper Labs, Multicoin Capital, 1kx, Warburg Serres and Hashed. The seed investment follows an earlier pre-seed investment by ConsenSys.

Venture funds and angels from the gaming scene also contributed, including Kevin Durant’s and Rich Kleiman’s Thirty Five Ventures, Marc Pincus’s WorkPlay Ventures, Play Ventures, WhaleShark, and GenG Esports and Rally Network founder Kevin Chou. 

“This investment round further accelerates the convergence of gaming and blockchain, specifically through supporting Community Gaming’s expansion of its product feature set and geographic coverage,” said Evan Feng, venture and liquid investor at CoinFund.

The investment round will help the company expand into Latin America and South East Asia as the first comprehensive blockchain-enabled payment solution in the gaming space, it said. 

Some players, both in crypto and gamers, have said the implementation of blockchain will make the gaming industry more secure and the technology can enhance reward-based experiences. 

Separately, Community Gaming’s unreleased rewards program will eventually enable highly engaged users to increase their earnings potential by completing weekly quests; and the recent investment will also allow for rapid development of this rewards program as well as more complex smart contracts for league play, the company said. 

In related gaming and blockchain news, also today Animoca Brands, a leading mobile and blockchain gaming developer, also participated in a $13 million Series A funding round for Mintable, a non-fungible token minting platform and marketplace.

As previously mentioned, Animoca Brands contributed to the $2.3 million seed round for Community Gaming and its contributions to both fundraisers show how investors are not limited to one marketplace and businesses are diving into other industries to broaden their crypto-based portfolio.

“Throughout 2021, NFTs have reached mass appeal, having touched almost every sector spanning entertainment, fine arts, sports, and many more,” said Zach Burks, CEO and founder of Mintable. 

Other investors in Mintable’s latest round include Ripple, which provides XRP Ledger developer tools, programmes, and services and enterprise blockchain solutions, Metapurse, the world’s largest NFT investment fund backed by Metakovan, Doug Band, American businessman and former advisor to Bill Clinton; and Jon Oringer, founder and executive chairman of Shutterstock. With the new injection of funds, Mintable will be focusing on scaling its operations and boosting its growth and user acquisition initiatives, it said. 

Throughout 2021, Mintable received backing from high-profile investors including billionaire and television personality Mark Cuban, Guy Oseary and Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures, Crypto.com, LongHash Ventures, and many more.