GB Market Commentary 07/12/2021
by Marcus Sotiriou
Launching of gaming funds for the crypto space has not slowed down. It was announced this morning that Binance Smart Chain and Animoca Brands (who are an early stage investor in NFT and metaverse projects, like Sandbox and Axie Infinity) have set up a $200 million programme for blockchain gaming. This is part of Binance’s $1 billion fund committed to Binance Smart Chain. Both companies will invest $100 million each. This comes after the gaming VC firm called Play Ventures announced last week that they are launching a $75 million fund dedicated to blockchain gaming projects. The firm said, “Web3 and play-and-earn will fundamentally disrupt the way games are designed, played and experienced.” In addition, it was just over a week ago where Solana Ventures, FTX, and Lightspeed Venture Partners teamed up to launch a $100 million gaming fund called GameFi.
In my opinion, this extraordinary amount of funding for projects that combine gaming with blockchain technology could result in many gaming tokens decoupling from Bitcoin in the next year or so, as the sector could go through a phase of hyper growth.
India is taking action towards regulating cryptocurrencies, as them government plans to introduce legislation in the ongoing parliament session. This is reported to likely give crypto holders a deadline to declare assets. Anyone not willing to comply may be fined up to 200 million rupees ($2.7 million) or imprisoned for 1.5 years. It was also said today, according to Bloomberg, that India is considering appointing its capital markets regulator to oversee cryptocurrencies and potentially classify them as financial assets.