The round was led by Borderless Capital and joined by Karma Innovations, Saeed Aldarmaki’s Sheesha Finance, and other noteworthy entrepreneurs. With advisors like Dr. Marwan Al Zarouni of the Blockchain Center, and Joey Brander, Managing Partner at First Serve Partners, Zone has built a gamefi ecosystem for decentralized real money gaming and on-chain fantasy sports.
“Online Gaming probably is one the first places where digital goods and digital assets took place more than a decade ago. Blockchain is the perfect rail for the gaming ecosystem to thrive, by adding the right economic incentives, ownership and tradeability features through gaming finance in a distributed fashion. ZONE is innovating in that space backed by Algorand blockchain technology, we are very excited to lead and join the ZONE team in this new digital gaming era” said David Garcia, CEO and Managing Partner of Borderless Capital.
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Zone aims to revolutionize gaming for the masses, and its gamefi products are designed to tap into network effects of popular existing games, to enable on-chain gaming challenges for everyone.
The company had already established a user base of a couple of million gamers in South Asia through engagement from its esports platform xtzesports.com, and will now integrate them with Zone to provide them opportunities in its play-to-earn economy.
Zone mentioned that it will also simplify user onboarding from Web 2.0 to Web 3.0, with its innovative gamefi Discord bot called Zobo, currently in 5,000 Discord servers. Zobo allows users to challenge their peers directly without the need to manage complicated cryptographic keys and wallets and at the same time allows Discord server owners to monetize their community with its fee-sharing model.
The company also announced its partnership with Boundless Art to launch its NFT collection, the AFK Elephants, as the first-ever project on the platform.
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“The NFTs are multi-utility in nature, serving as tangible reputation signals for gamers’ digital avatars and pseudonymous identity across the Algorand blockchain. Additionally, along with built-in rewards systems, the NFTs grant their holders guaranteed allocation at the ZONE IDO which is planned for early November.”, said Adi K Mishra, the Founder, CEO of ZONE.
“We are excited to see visionary organizations like ZONE leverage the Algorand blockchain for its high performance and capabilities that can catalyze a new era of gaming and fan engagement,” said David Markley of Algorand. “With scalable, environmentally sustainable and low cost blockchain infrastructure, we are thrilled to see the acceleration of decentralized gaming applications in the Algorand ecosystem.”
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