Rare Bits, a marketplace dedicated to the buying and selling of non-fungible crypto assets, has raised $6 million in series A round of venture capital funding led by Spark Capital and joined by First Round Capital and other investors, the marketplace founders announced on Medium.
Started by four serial entrepreneurs who were previously with Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL), Zynga (NASDAQ: ZNGA) and FanDuel, Rare Bits aims to help the members of crypto community to discover new crypto assets, manage their own crypto assets in one place with a visualized wallet experience and buy and sell crypto assets via auction with zero fees (like they would do on eBay, but free).
“Blockchain-based smart contracts offer something that virtual goods have always wanted: the ability for a person to buy, sell, and trade that item without a centralized controller like a Facebook, Activision, or Google who really “owns” that item and is renting it to you,” Nabeel Hyatt, partner at Spark Capital, noted in his post on Medium.
He added that today virtual goods are spread on dozens of sites with no simple interface to interact with them – a problem which the team behind Rare Bits was able to address by building their platform.
“What gets traded on the platform will undoubtedly change, but the core need for a transparent exchange for these goods is something we at Spark are excited to partner with the team on,” he added.
Citing the popularity gained by CryptoKitties, launched last year as one of the first Ethereum-based games where users could buy or sell individually unique digital cats, the team behind Rare Bits believes this game demonstrated a new way of representing ownership in a decentralized way using the Ethereum blockchain.
“Even if the CryptoKitties site shuts down, the Ethereum blockchain stores a record of who owns which cats, so that anyone could setup a new site or a new marketplace to let the game live on,” they explain.
The Series A funding will help Rare Bits enhance its zero fee peer-to-peer market place and bring new people from the world of gaming on board.
“While currently our focus is on enabling the exchange of items from games and crypto-based collectibles. We believe that very soon we could see software licenses, deeds to real estate, royalty rights, non-fungible securities, and many other goods be represented in this manner,” Rare Bits founders said commenting on the round closure.
Currently Rare Bits has more than half a million items listed on the platform ranging from CryptoKitties to games such as CryptoPunks, CryptoBots, CryptoFighters among others.
By Jade Olafson