NPC Labs, founded by former Coinbase employees, secured $21 million in funding
Speed Reading: The Game Ecosystem B3.fun Built by Former Coinbase Employees Based on BaseAuthor: Karen, Foresight News
Web3 games, as a fertile ground for developers and capital to flock to, are nurturing infinite possibilities. Today, we introduce a game ecosystem built on Base called B3.fun, which has announced the completion of $21 million in Pre-Seed and Seed funding this month by its contributing team, NPC Labs.
B3 is not only an L3 network on Base but also a one-stop game store. NPC Labs believes that by providing both entertaining and highly engaging casual and hyper-casual gaming experiences, it can become a one-stop shop for game developers, benefiting both developers and players while deeply attracting a wide player base.
The three co-founders of NPC Labs all have backgrounds in Coinbase and Base
NPC Labs is the core contributor to B3.fun, which is a game ecosystem built on Base and can be seen as an L3 on Base, dedicated to establishing a seamless and open gaming ecosystem that changes the ownership and incentive models for gamers and developers.
On July 23, NPC Labs announced the completion of an $18 million seed round, with participation from Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Mirana Ventures, Sfermion, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund. Combined with the Pre-Seed round, NPC Labs has raised a total of $21 million, with angel investors from Coinbase, Base, Optimism, Bybit, the NFT card game Parallel, Yield Guild Games, Proof of Play, Delphi Venture, and others.
It is worth mentioning that all three co-founders of NPC Labs have backgrounds in Coinbase and Base. They left their previous employer at the end of March this year, co-founded NPC Labs in April, and quickly launched the testnet last month. The three co-founders are:
Daryl Xu: Former core contributor at Base, former business development manager at Coinbase, currently serving as CEO of NPC Labs;
Viktoriya Hying: Former business development manager at Coinbase Base, currently serving as COO of NPC Labs;
Sean Geng: Former engineering manager at Coinbase, currently serving as CTO of NPC Labs.
According to The Block, NPC Labs currently has 5 employees and plans to expand cross-functional departments such as engineering, marketing, and promotion to grow the team to 10 people. In a report by VentureBeat, Viktoriya Hying clearly expressed the company's core vision, "We are ensuring that we can operate robustly and achieve our goals. This funding will allow us to maintain a high level of flexibility and vigilance in the face of future fluctuations, especially in a potential bear market, without being distracted by funding issues. Our goal is to launch 100 games on B3 within 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 microservices architecture that can support high-frequency transaction processing per second and is close to achieving a gas-free transaction environment. More importantly, with ChainSafe's chain abstraction technology, B3.fun allows users to enjoy a smoother gaming experience without worrying about cross-chain or network switching issues.
B3.fun aims to provide gamers with a simple, frictionless entry experience into blockchain gaming, with the goal of becoming a one-stop shop for game developers, running infrastructure for developers and helping them with marketing and distribution so they can focus on developing fun games. The B3 mainnet will be launched later.
Currently, in the testnet phase, B3 has already begun to support games developed on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM-compatible chains, with plans to introduce support for more blockchains in the future. B3 also has the potential to integrate games from other blockchains such as Solana.
In addition, B3 has established partnerships with over 350 non-custodial wallet providers, data visualization platforms, 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 available on the B3 testnet?
When asked whether B3 would launch its own token upon the mainnet launch, Daryl Xu stated that this decision depends on the foundation. B3 also clearly mentions on its official website that participating in the B3 testnet does not grant any rewards on the mainnet, but players can compete on the game leaderboard. Here are some games that have launched on the B3 testnet:
Dino Runner: Dino Runner is a 3D endless runner game where players control a dinosaur to run, jump, dodge obstacles, and survive to earn DINO.
PEWPEW TAP: Tap to fire, tap to earn, tap to conquer. Players shoot lasers to generate unique hash values and earn PEWPEW tokens on-chain.
Neighborhood Defense: In this tower defense game, players face a zombie invasion and must strategically build and upgrade archer towers, bomber towers, power towers, and sniper towers to protect their community and earn ZOMB tokens. Additionally, there is another token called COINZ in Neighborhood Defense.
Key Quest: Players jump through obstacles to grab keys to complete levels. Additionally, collecting stars scattered throughout each level earns STARS.
Pixel Zombie Crush: Players earn ZOMB by smashing zombies before they reach the bottom of the screen.
Fruit Merge: A matching puzzle game where players earn JUICE by matching the same type of fruit to merge them.
Don't Crash: The longer players drive, the more CRASH tokens they earn.
All of the above games are available on web and mobile platforms. In addition, the B3 testnet also features several Mac desktop games and Telegram games, such as the Telegram game Pinball. Viktoriya Hying stated that many of the games we release on the mainnet will be Telegram games and instances, aiming to simplify the process and make it a sticky and fun experience.
However, when I logged in yesterday, all of the above games displayed "invalid session" and loading, and it was unclear whether it was a bug. Today, the aforementioned games have returned to normal. However, the process of entering the games is relatively slow, and the gaming experience is fairly smooth.
Interaction Strategies
Claim B3 testnet test tokens by connecting your wallet and clicking the white dot (https://faucet.b3.fun/);
Claim Base Sepolia test tokens:
https://faucet.quicknode.com/base/sepolia
or https://www.alchemy.com/faucets/base-sepolia
or https://console.optimism.io/faucet
- Cross-chain (deposit and withdraw):
https://bridge.b3.fun/#
Create Avatar NFT (ERC1155 format). Avatars can be automatically generated in 3D or pixel art styles, or manually uploaded. The avatar generation time is approximately 1 minute.
Play the above games, but you need to mint on the testnet before playing.
In summary, NPC Labs, founded in April this year, has completed funding and launched the testnet in about three months, with multiple games already showcased on the testnet. Although the gaming experience still needs improvement, it demonstrates the team's execution and efficiency. While each game attempt and the establishment of each gaming ecosystem are important forces driving the Web3 gaming field forward, we still need to observe whether NPC Labs can continue to make progress and gain a leading position in this field in the future.
