NPC Labs raised $21 million in financing. What are the highlights of its core product B3.fun?

Original title: "How did NPC Labs, founded by former Coinbase employees, win 21 million in financing?"

Original author: Karen, Foresight News

Web3 games are a hotbed for developers and capital to rush in, and are pregnant with infinite possibilities. Today, we will introduce a game ecosystem built on Base, B3.fun. The team behind it, NPC Labs, announced the completion of 21 million Pre-Seed and Seed rounds of financing this month.

B3 is not only an L3 network on Base, but also a one-stop game store. NPC Labs believes that by providing both interesting and sticky casual and hyper-casual game experiences, it can become a one-stop shop for game developers, which can deeply attract a large number of players while benefiting both developers and players.

All three co-founders of NPC Labs have backgrounds in Coinbase and Base

NPC Labs is a core contributor to B3.fun, a game ecosystem built on Base, which can be seen as L3 on Base, and is committed to building a seamless and open game ecosystem to change the ownership and incentive model of gamers and developers.

On July 23, NPC Labs announced the completion of a $18 million seed round of financing, with participation from Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Mirana Ventures, Sfermion, Bitscale Capital and Mantle EcoFund. Combined with the Pre-Seed round of financing, NPC Labs has raised a total of $21 million in financing, with angel investors from Coinbase, Base, Optimism, Bybit, NFT card game Parallel, Yield Guild Games, Proof of Play, Delphi Venture, etc.

It is worth mentioning that the three co-founders of NPC Labs all have backgrounds in Coinbase and Base. They left their former employers at the end of March this year, co-founded NPC Labs in April, and quickly launched the test network last month. The three co-founders are:

1. Daryl Xu: former core contributor of Base, former business development manager of Coinbase, and CEO of NPC Labs;

2. Viktoriya Hying: Former business development manager of Coinbase Base, serving as chief operating officer at NPC Labs;

3. Sean Geng: Former engineering manager of Coinbase, serving as chief technology officer at NPC Labs.

According to The Block, NPC Labs currently has 5 employees and plans to expand cross-functional departments such as engineering, marketing and marketing to expand the team size to 10 people. In the report of VentureBeat, Viktoriya Hying clearly expressed the core vision of the company, "We are ensuring that we can operate robustly and achieve our goals. This financing will enable us to maintain a high degree of flexibility and alertness in future fluctuations, especially in the bear market environment that may be encountered, without being distracted by funding issues. Our goal is to launch 100 games on B3 in the next 12 months."

What is B3.fun?

NPC Labs CEO Daryl Xu introduced that B3.fun, as a Layer3 ecosystem built on Base, is similar to a microservice architecture. It can support high-frequency transaction processing per second and is close to achieving a transaction environment without Gas fees. More importantly, with the help of ChainSafe's chain abstraction technology, B3.fun allows users to enjoy a smoother and unimpeded gaming experience without having to worry about cross-chain or network switching.

B3.fun hopes to provide gamers with a simple and frictionless entry experience for chain games. The goal is to become a one-stop shop for game developers, running infrastructure for developers and helping them with marketing and distribution so that they can focus on developing interesting games. The B3 mainnet will be launched later.

Currently, in the testnet stage, B3 has been able to initially support games developed based on Ethereum, Base and other EVM-compatible chains, and plans to introduce support for more blockchains in the future. B3 will also have the potential to integrate games from other blockchains such as Solana.

In addition, B3 has established partnerships with more than 350 non-custodial wallet service providers, data visualization platforms and data suppliers, as well as on-ramps and oracle services, aiming to provide game developers with more direct and convenient solutions.

What games are currently on the B3 testnet?

When asked whether B3 will also launch its own token when the mainnet is launched, Daryl Xu said that the decision depends on the foundation. B3 also clearly mentioned on the official website that participating in the B3 testnet does not allow you to obtain any rewards on the mainnet, but you can compete in the game leaderboard. Here are a few games launched on the B3 testnet:

1. Dino Runner: Dino Runner is a 3D endless runner game where players control dinosaurs to run, jump, dodge obstacles and survive to earn DINO.

2. PEWPEW TAP: tap to fire, tap to earn, tap to conquer. Players fire lasers to generate unique hash values and earn PEWPEW tokens on the chain.

3. Neighborhood Defense: Players will face zombie invasions in this tower defense game and need to strategically build and upgrade archer towers, bomber towers, power towers, and sniper towers to protect our community and earn ZOMB tokens. In addition, there is another token in the Neighborhood Defense game, COINZ.

4. Key Quest: Players pass levels by jumping through obstacles and grabbing keys. In addition, you can earn STARS by grabbing the stars scattered in each level.

5. Pixel Zombie Crush: Players earn ZOMBs by crushing pixelated zombies before they reach the bottom of the screen.

6. Fruit Merge: It is a matching puzzle game where players earn JUICE by matching fruits of the same type to merge.

7. Don't Crash: The longer you drive a vehicle, the more CRASH tokens you earn.

The above games are all web and mobile games. In addition, there are many Mac desktop games and Telegram games on the B3 test network, such as the Telegram game Pinball. Viktoriya Hying said that many of the games we released on the main network will be Telegram games and instances, hoping to simplify the process and make it a sticky and interesting experience.

However, when I logged in yesterday, the above games all showed "invalid session" and loading, and it is not clear whether it is a bug. Today, the above games have returned to normal. However, the process of entering the game is relatively slow, and the gaming experience is relatively smooth.

Interaction Strategy

1. Receive B3 test network test coins, connect to the wallet and click the white dot (https://faucet.b3.fun/);

2. Get Base Sepolia test coins:

https://faucet.quicknode.com/base/sepolia

or https://www.alchemy.com/faucets/base-sepolia

or https://console.optimism.io/faucet

3. Cross-chain (deposit and withdrawal):

https://bridge.b3.fun/#

4. Create Avatar NFT (ERC1155 format). The avatar can be automatically generated in 3D or pixel art style, or uploaded manually. The Avatar generation time is about 1 minute.

5. Play the above games. You need to cast them in the test network before playing the games.

In summary, NPC Labs, which was founded in April this year, completed financing and launched the test network in about 3 months. Currently, many games have been launched on the test network. Although the game experience needs to be improved, it also demonstrates the team's execution and efficiency. Although the attempt of each game and the establishment of each game ecosystem are important forces to promote the continuous development of the Web3 game field, for NPC Labs, whether it can continue to make progress and gain a leading position in this field in the future, we still need to keep observing.

References:

https://venturebeat.com/games/npc-labs-raises-18m-to-bring-mainstream-games-to-web3/

https://www.theblock.co/post/306612/coinbase-alumni-web3-gaming-npc-labs-funding

https://www.coindesk.com/web3/2024/07/22/npc-labs-raises-18m-to-scale-gaming-on-base-network/

https://docs.b3.fun/

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