Twitch co-founder secures $24M funding for Metatheory blockchain game

The co-founder of Twitch, Kevin Lin, has secured $24 million for the Metatheory blockchain game he created. The blockchain game based in San Francisco will focus on releasing high-quality projects, including virtual worlds.

Metatheory secures $24M funding

The $24 million funding round was led by Andreesen Horowitz, and it saw participation from other crypto firms such as FTX Ventures and Pantera Capital. Metatheory was released in Q3 2021, focusing on creating Web3 games and virtual worlds.

Metatheory uses the blockchain gaming space as its first foray into the Web3 sector. It is focused on creating franchises with a strong IP that will extend beyond ordinary gaming and into other things.

Jonathan Lai, a partner at Andreesen Horowitz, said that the “Metatheory is redefining how games and stories are told from the bottom up using web 3 primitives, and we couldn’t be more excited to partner with co-founder Kevin Lin and team on a journey to build the next generation Disney.”

Lin has been active in the crypto space since 2011, when Kyle Vogt, a co-founder of Twitch, announced they would mine Bitcoin from Twitch offices. Lin is not the only Twitch creator venturing into NFTs. Justin Kan, a co-founder of Twitch, also started the Fractal NFT marketplace that would allow the company to secure money from blockchain-based games.

Blockchain-based games have exploded in popularity over the past year. Venture capitalists are rushing to secure a space in this sector, triggering significant growth in the space.

Lin noted that the idea of creating a blockchain game came from the need to support interactive content. One of the founding team members of the project, Bernie Su, held an interactive show where the audience was required to vote through live pools to assess the characters maintained on the show and what these characters would achieve.

“The idea was that if we could do this as a full-blown game, we could build the story and the lore with our community. That was the interesting part. And so our first concept was more like a story world set in a different universe. It was about the relationship between humans and nature, but lighthearted with a little bit of dark humor,” Su said.

New DuskBreakers project

DuskBreakers is the next game that the company is working on. The game is created in a future world where digital and crypto adoption will peak. The world is then invaded by a giant spaceship that affects the power grid.

DuskBreakers was launched in December last year, and the world art was created by Geers. The game sold out the first 10,000 NFTs dubbed the Genesis DuskBreakers within six days. Those who buy the NFTs get the first chance to enter the spaceship and collect materials needed to sustain life.

The Genesis NFTs represent each of the 10,000 recruited Breakers that invade the spaceship using a space elevator to collect materials and fight off creatures.