Today Ripple announced its funding arm, Xpring, is planning a $100 million investment in the gaming sector to promote the use of XRP for in-game economies. Forte, the newly announced blockchain gaming platform will operate the fund.
Investments will target game economies with more than 50,000 daily active users. Game developers seeking financing also need to have an interest in using blockchain for innovation including potentially new game designs.
Ripple’s Interledger Protocol will be used for cross-chain interoperability to enable the conversion of in-game tokens to XRP for settlement.
“Both Forte and Ripple have a shared belief that blockchain technology will have a massive impact on games, and that providing tools that are easy-to-use, chain agnostic and interoperable is a necessary step in driving scale consumer adoption,” said Ethan Beard, Senior Vice President of Ripple’s Xpring.
Forte’s backers include a16z crypto, Andreessen Horowitz, Battery Ventures, Canaan Partners, Coinbase Ventures, 1confirmation, and others.
“We’re excited to connect with developers who are running live game economies with tens of thousands of daily active users or more and have an active interest in using blockchain technology to improve their business,” said Allen Ma, VP Partnerships, Forte.
Forte was announced just three weeks ago. Its founder and CEO Kevin Chou previously started mobile games company Kabam and grew it to $400 million in revenue. In the launch announcement, the company says in-game digital transactions amounts to an $80 billion sector or 80% of global games revenue.
“The microtransaction-driven game industry has matured and consolidated, and as a result innovation has grown stagnant. Blockchain technology offers new growth vectors and an opportunity to do things differently,” said Chou at the time of the launch. “We are focused on making blockchain technology ready for the mass market and working closely with developers to create player-driven game economies that benefit both players and developers.”
Ripple’s Xpring said on its blog that “we’ve worked with the Forte team from early on to deeply embed Interledger, Codius and XRP in the platform architecture to maximize cross-chain interoperability, security and liquidity.”
To date Xpring’s investments have included Securitize for tokenizing private securities, tokenized debt platform Dharma, XRPL Labs which provides XRP tools, and Kava the Interledger Solution provider. Additionally Ripple is investing $50 million in its university blockchain research intitiative.
