🎉 Funding Secured! Sky Mavis Series A

• We've raised 7.5 M USD to scale Axie Infinity and NFT gaming to billions of users! We’re hiring aggressively to bolster our ranks with missionaries.

• Axie is a genre-defining digital nation that’s jump-starting a mass migration towards NFT gaming.

• If you'd like to learn about using NFTs in games, reach out to us at publishing@skymavis.com.

Sometimes you’re so early to a market that you feel like you’re building for yourself and a few close friends. When Axie was born 3 years ago, almost nobody cared or understood what an NFT was.

Our office in 2018. Bear market grinding is imprinted in our culture.

We knew most of our players by name and Axie Discord felt like an intimate chat by campfire. How things have changed!

In retrospect, this was a crucial rite of passage for us and our battle-hardened community. It was dark and cold but the scar tissue is our secret weapon and that environment can never be recreated. In the beginning, we attracted a community of missionaries more interested in changing gaming than quick money.

These are our core beliefs:

• NFTs enable new types of games: just as mobile gaming unlocked new design space and player archetypes, so too will NFT games. These games won’t look like the games of the past and will require an entirely new perspective and skillset to build.

• Gamers crave property rights: property rights incentivize players to act more like founders and employees rather than users. These rights include: being able to sell your game assets to anyone in the world, earning liquid tokens for playing/contributing, and being able to own a piece of the game you’re playing.

• Play-to-earn: unlocks new types of work around digital Metaverse economies, just as Uber, AirBNB, and DoorDash created new types of jobs and professions.

✨A New Age

From humble beginnings, Axie has grown to be the largest NFT gaming ecosystem with the metrics to prove it:

• Over 41,000 daily active users + 45,000+ Axie holders

• Over 15 M USD in monthly NFT volume.

• A fully diluted market cap of over 2 Billion USD.

• The #1 NFT game and one of the most used applications on Ethereum.

This is just the beginning of a long and fascinating journey. The next steps involve:

1. Lowering barriers to entry. It’s still too hard to get started with NFT games. So we’ve built  Ronin, an Ethereum sidechain tailor-made to scale Axie Infinity and other digital nations moving forward.

2. More fun. We’ve already started hiring traditional game developers. Tesla was able to acquire the skills they lacked because their vision was huge and acted as a magnet for talent. Why wait for triple AAA game studios to catch on when we can simply hire their star talent? 

3. Scaling play to earn. As an NFT game grows its community, advertisers and sponsors will start injecting capital into these ecosystems, making them even more attractive to gamers. This means that NFT games will benefit from network effects in a way that games have never been able to before.

🛡️ The Battle to Come

NFTs with utility and fun baked into them are an inevitable part of the future.

So far, we’ve been underfunded. We’ve been scrappy and this will always be a part of our DNA. Thankfully, this new funding round will allow us to be more aggressive with our hiring and our growth experiments. We anticipate Axie scaling to millions of users through:

• A world class creator program that blends the best referral systems ever created and adds a touch of blockchain magic.

• Free to play-to-earn will unlock millions of new users who will try Axie for the fun before making any economic decisions. Hundreds of thousands of users try to play Axie each month but give up due to all the steps.

• User generated content will unleash the true potential of Axie. In the future, Sky Mavis will be one of many organizations building on top of Axie and Ronin. Axie will become a hive mind not limited by the ideas of a single central team.

Axie’s success will act as a magnet to attract more builders to NFT gaming. We’ll help these pioneers launch and scale their projects both technically using Ronin and by introducing our peerless community to their products.

This is the future we see ahead. It’s still so early, especially for NFT games which we believe require the most work but also have the largest potential.

To help summon this future we’re thrilled to share that we’ve raised 7.5 M USD through an amazing group of new community members.

We're hiring gritty, gifted, and persuasive missionaries to help us in this epic quest.

Here are some quotes from our awesome group of investors:

"Axie Infinity is at the intersection of gaming and NFTs, two of the fastest growing and most promising cryptocurrency use cases.  With over 30,000 daily active users, they have proven product-market fit and an incredibly passionate community.  We're excited to support Sky Mavis as they scale to the next 300,000 and then 3 million users."

- Ari Paul, CIO at Blocktower Capital

"The Sky Mavis team is pioneering community owned games. They have fostered a community of committed players because of their ability to provide true economic freedom within their ecosystem. We are thrilled to be investors in them and to be supporting their quest to showcase the power of player ownership."

- Jason Chapman, Partner at Konvoy

“Sitting at the intersection of digital play, property ownership, and the future of work—Axie Infinity is one of the most fascinating and ambitious gaming projects in the world. With over 30k DAUs and 40k Axie holders, and no signs of slowing down, we’re witnessing a powerful, community-run digital nation form in real time. We are excited to partner with the stellar team at Sky Mavis as they scale Axie Infinity over the next decade.”

- Collab + Currency’s Derek Schloss and Stephen McKeon

I think Axie is an amazing platform. It's fun and engaging. It's a game you want to play for hours on end. Add the Axie economy and you have something special. I'm excited to be part of it.

- Mark Cuban

"We are excited to support the Sky Mavis team as they continue to build category defining games such as Axie Infinity and explore the intersection between gaming, social and digital ownership. Games with digital property rights and participatory economies turn users into owners and are spawning a new wave of experimentation and value creation."

- Libertus Capital

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