- Strategic Shift to Utility & Ownership: BCW Ventures targets Web3 gaming because the sector has matured from speculative hype to infrastructure-led utility.
- Animoca Brands as a Market Leader: A cornerstone of the BCW Ventures portfolio is Animoca Brands, a dominant force in the Web3 gaming and the Metaverse that champions digital property rights and manages a massive ecosystem of over 600 companies.
- GameFi Ventures & Infrastructure: GameFi Ventures accelerates early-stage blockchain games and infrastructure, with a portfolio that includes Yuga Labs, Shrapnel, and Mantra Chain.
Investing in Web3 gaming and Metaverse has transformed from a hype-driven speculative prospect to a supportive measure for infrastructure-led utility throughout the decade. This is why BCW Ventures has made strategic investments in companies supporting the growth of Web3 gaming and Metaverse applications that continue to provide the most value to the industry sector.
One of the strongest benefits of gaming in Web3 is that gamers retain ownership of their in-game assets. Skins, land, characters, and other assets are tokenised as NFTs and become portable in Web3 wallets. Contrast that with items within “walled garden” AAA games whose items are locked within a single game you may not want to play anymore.
As studios release more games, the number of assets proliferate, increasing revenue on both games and secondary markets for in-game assets. Tokenised ownership of in-game assets carries the potential to expand interoperability between gaming platforms, which adds cross-game utility. Those elements make games stickier.
Each month, millions of unique active wallets are interacting with Web3 games, which presents an opportunity for game developers who make viral games.
The market cap of the tokens native to the top ten gaming platforms tops $1.7B, an impressive tally for an industry sector with so much potential.
Learn more about our investments across the Web3 industry in our blog.
Our Web3 Gaming & Metaverse Portfolio
We are very excited for what the future brings for entrepreneurs developing Web3 games and solutions for Metaverse applications. Our investments in these areas include:
Animoca Brands
Animoca Brands is a dominant player in developing Web3 game titles and the open metaverse. It operates as both a venture capital firm and a hands-on architect of Web3 industrial primitives. A guiding principle for Animoca is to promote and expand digital property rights via NFTs, blockchain gaming, metaverse interactions, and others.
Animoca has amassed a large portfolio with stakes in over 600 Web3 companies such as Metaverse hub The Sandbox, expansive Web3 gaming ecosystem Axie Infinity, and leading NFT marketplace OpenSea. The Sandbox’s $SAND token and Axie Infinity’s $AXS are leading assets in the sector, combining for nearly $700M at the time of publish.
Its flagship project Mocaverse is an interoperable identity layer. It claims to fulfill Animoca’s core aims by allowing users to carry their reputation and assets across games and dApps.
Gamefi Ventures
Gamefi Ventures is a specialised venture capital firm dedicated to investing in and accelerating the next generation of blockchain gaming and Web3 ecosystems, including Metaverse projects. It focuses on early-stage opportunities where they can leverage their network to help projects scale.
Gamefi prioritise investments in blockchain games, play-to-own economies, and the underlying tech (like RWA tokenisation and L1/L2 chains) that powers them. Gamefi has an impressive portfolio in at least 14 companies including Yuga Labs, which owns the Bored Ape Yacht Club and subsidiary IPs, Animoca Brands’ Mocaverse, the Shrapnel NFT marketplace, the Apeiron Web3 game, and Mantra Chain $OM.
