Skip to content Skip to sidebar Skip to footer

The past several months haven’t been entirely kind to the NFT market — while transaction volume hasn’t stuttered too significantly, the dollar amount invested in the space has been in free fall as cryptocurrency prices have taken a historic dive. With that as background, it might not seem like the best time to launch an NFT platform, let alone one geared toward children.
And yet, NFT startup Cryptoys is raising tens of millions of dollars with the goal of building a blockchain-based toy company that can expose younger users to the ideas of digital ownership and NFT mechanics. The platform, which will launch widely in the next couple months, features cutesy big-eyed animal characters with hats, sunglasses and cryptographically ensured uniqueness.
Platforms for trading non-fungible tokens have often proven themselves difficult for even adult users to navigate, so the prospect of building an onboarding for younger users seems quite daunting. Cryptoys will be side-stepping some of this friction by partnering with Dapper Labs and launching their platform on the startup’s Flow blockchain. Flow, which Dapper’s NBA Top Shot runs on, offers a blockchain-lite experience that lets users sidestep some of the hallmark stumbling blocks of NFT land including high gas fees, convoluted wallet onboardings and the inability to transact with payment methods like credit cards.
Magic Eden raises $130M, hitting unicorn status at $1.6B valuation
Even so, making a blockchain easy enough for kids to use is a bit of a moot point at the moment, as users signing up for the platform will be required to be 18 or older, though CEO Will Weinraub says that parent-controlled wallets are on the way that will allow younger users to interact more directly with the platform and learn about NFTs.
“You have to take a step back from all of this web3 maximalism,” Weinraub says. “You’ve got to take baby steps to getting millions and millions of people to these new paradigms.”
Cryptoys is getting some help on this journey. The startup tells TechCrunch it has recently closed a $23 million Series A round led by a16z Crypto with participation with a host of other partners including Mattel, Dapper Labs, Draper & Associates, Acrew Capital, CoinFund, Animoca Brands and Sound Ventures. The startup announced a $7.5 million seed round — also led by a16z Crypto — in October.
Image Credits: OnChain Studios
The funding will give Cryptoys’ parent company OnChain Studios some capital to build out their vision, which includes a number of NFT-adjacent opportunities including games where users have the chance to earn NFTs through gameplay. Weinraub notes that the company is also planning to build experiences that won’t require that users interact with NFTs, something that may prove helpful as the startup looks to approach younger users on platforms like iOS, which hasn’t been very friendly to the crypto industry — though Weinraub believes that could change.
“Apple is constantly evolving how they think about these things,” he says.
Among the biggest questions raised by an NFT-for-kids platform is why kids would care about their in-app purchases being blockchain-ordained. Weinraub says that kids bouncing from platform to platform means a lot of digital asset value being lost, and he thinks his own children would be interested in reselling in-game items they’ve bought and grown tired of to fund new digital purchases. Weinraub believes that the phenomenon of parents spending hefty sums on cartoon animal NFTs has left a lot of space to bond with their kids over investments and what digital ownership means.
For those parents that have gotten involved in the NFT space in the past several months, it’s fair to say that many investments haven’t turned out as profitable as anticipated even as many of the companies involved have seen big paydays. Asked whether the startup missed a historic launch window of NFT razzmatazz, Weinraub rebuffs, “it’s a much better time to launch products, a lot of the hype has been driven out of the market.”
The NFT slump is real (really)
As part of the multi-year agreement, the Portuguese soccer star and Binance will create a series of NFT collections for sale on the company's platform, the cryptocurrency exchange said, adding that the first collection would be released later this year. An NFT is a digital asset that exists on a blockchain, a record of transactions kept on networked computers, and the blockchain serves as a public ledger, allowing anyone to verify the NFT's authenticity and check who owns it. Souring investor sentiment toward risky assets has led to a plunge in cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin, and has also spilled over into NFTs, which exploded in popularity last year.
Shō Club in San Francisco will offer members 24/7 dedicated concierges and special menus, among other perks.
A Portage County judge sentenced a man to a year and suspended his driver's license for eight years for a 36-mile high-speed police pursuit.
Is your pup begging for peas? Here's what to know before letting him in on the snack.
Matt has the latest on the weekend forecast.
Lightweight and flattering, it's a great top to add to your summer rotation.
For those of us who've been a little bit wobbly on the mental health front over the past couple of years, there are a bunch of options starting to crop up. The on-demand chat-based therapy options are one and at-home ketamine-assisted treatments are another. You sign up and give them some money and are taken through a telemedicine protocol to figure out whether ketamine is a reasonable treatment option for you.
Security researchers at Lookout recently tied a previously unattributed Android mobile spyware, dubbed Hermit, to Italian software house RCS Lab. Now, Google threat researchers have confirmed much of Lookout's findings and are notifying Android users whose devices were compromised by the spyware. Hermit is a commercial spyware known to be used by governments, with victims in Kazakhstan and Italy, according to Lookout and Google.
At its re:Mars conference, Amazon today announced the launch of CodeWhisperer, an AI pair programming tool similar to GitHub's Copilot that can autocomplete entire functions based on only a comment or a few keystrokes. It's now available in preview as part of the AWS IDE Toolkit, which means developers can immediately use it right inside their preferred IDEs, including Visual Studio Code, IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, WebStorm and Amazon's own AWS Cloud 9. Support for the AWS Lambda Console is also coming soon.
The US sprinting sensation, who was a top qualifier for the last Olympic Games, was disqualified from competing in Tokyo because of a failed drug test.
The former Portuguese colony reported 39 new infections on Friday, bringing the total for its current outbreak to 149, with around a dozen buildings locked down and residents banned from leaving, the local government said in a statement. Macau, a Chinese special administrative region, is testing its more than 600,000 residents for the coronavirus for a second time this week. A makeshift hospital, located next to Macau's Las Vegas modelled Cotai Strip, is also expected to open on Friday.
A handful of hard-to-find watches are going up for sale through London-based dealer, A Collected Man.
I could spend hours combing through these deals.
The White Sox manager says the popular prospect reminds him of Andrew Vaughn.
It's "not impossible" law enforcement authorities would have the power to obtain intimate user data, tech policy expert Eva Blum-Dumontet said.
Thermite from Howe and Howe is a remote-controlled firefighting robot.
Are you tired of editing perfectly posed pictures for social media or learning complicated TikTok dances?

source

Leave a comment