Axie Infinity is a play-to-earn game that allows users to earn tokens and NFTs. Then, they can sell them. Axie Infinity
According to Jeff Mei, Huobi's GameFi could transform the gaming industry and drive the digital economy.
Investors are excited by the fast use of decentralized finance, and the excitement surrounding making money from NFT games such as Axie Infinity.
Huobi has a $10 million fund to help scale startups that work on GameFi, or blockchain-based gaming with DeFi mechanisms.
GameFi is one the most popular technologies in crypto, and early investors can anticipate gaming-related collectibles powering virtual economies, according Jeff Mei (director of global strategy at Huobi).
Insider spoke with him recently about the need for the "hottest, most innovative, creative, and most promising assets" on the market.
GameFi, which combines decentralized finance with the gaming industry is drawing mass attention from both the crypto community as well as the largest gaming guilds.
The business model allows players to share in the game development dividends. Their most prominent feature is "play to win".
Mei outlined two reasons for its growth: the evolution in financial mechanisms in games and users liking that they are able to make money playing.
Huobi has a $10 million fund for emerging GameFi projects. He stated that Huobi is investing in incubating and coaching several early-stage projects as "this is going be a very hot sector."
Huobi's Fund will support GameFi projects at the start-up stage. This will include marketing and PR support as well as financial and legal advice. It also introduces potential partners.
Mei stated that "our investment teams and research teams are always working round the clock to find these product," Supernova, Immutable and Rangers Protocol were some of the first projects Huobi’s investment arm funded.
Jeff Mei is Huobi's global strategy director. Huobi
He stated that he wanted to help users identify the most valuable projects, innovative projects, and projects that can be adopted quickly. "There are so many fake projects out there - they are all vaporware." They want to make quick money and get away."
Huobi, founded in China in 2013, is no longer operating in its home country. Huobi is looking to expand its presence into countries with high crypto adoption and large retail traders, such as India, Vietnam and Turkey.
Mei explained that Huobi's expansion strategy in Southeast Asia seems to be based on GameFi's huge potential. He said, "We'll be focusing more on retail uses." Axie Infinity is a popular GameFi project in Vietnam.
Sky Mavis, a Vietnamese developer, created the ethereum-based game. It saw its daily active users surpass 1 million in August. This was just three years after its launch.
Axolotls are the game's main characters. They are called Axies and are non-fungible tokens or NFTs that can be bought or sold.
NFT sales have risen this year due to a growing demand for Play-to-Earn Games, also known as GameFi. NonFungible.com reports that the NFT market reached a record $2.5Billion in July 2021. This compares to just $13.7M in the first half 2020. Huobi will launch its NFT marketplace in November.
This boom is due to the emergence layer 2 scaling solutions that allow ethereum to be traded and mined without incurring exorbitant transaction costs.
"Gaming is a hot topic in Southeast Asia, such as in Korea and Japan. Mei stated that this is the type of area we want to explore.
Although Huobi is working on some very unique projects, the company is mostly testing new, cutting-edge partners.
