- Publisher Carry1st has acquired $20 million in Series A investment to help the company continue to grow its product development in Africa, which has the potential to become the world's leading gaming center within a decade.
- Elon Musk has taken a strong position against Twitter's most recent decision to allow non-fungible tokens onto its platform.
Carry1st’s project in Africa
Publisher Carry1st has acquired $20 million in Series A investment to help the company continue to grow its product development in Africa, which has the potential to become the world's leading gaming center within a decade. Carry1st publishes web-based and social games for mobile devices.
The investment round was headed by Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has been quite active in the blockchain field, with participation from Avenir and Alphabet, the parent company of Google, as well as other investors.
Carry1st's current backers, including Riot Games, Konvoy Ventures, Raine Ventures, and TTV Capital, also participated in the financing round. Riot Games, Konvoy Ventures, Raine Ventures, and TTV Capital were among the investors.
Buy and sell crypto in 5 minutes.
Carry1st intends to utilize the financial infusion to increase its content portfolio, expand its in-house development team, and launch a new growth plan in order to attract tens of millions of new customers. The development of infrastructure to enable play-to-earn gaming, which allows players to monetize their gaming experience, is a critical component of the company's growth plan.
It was revealed by CEO Sundar Pichai in October 2021 that Alphabet will invest in Carry1st as part of its Africa digital transformation project.
As recently as 2014, Google CEO Sundar Pichai recognized Africa as a significant growth engine for the digital economy, with an estimated 300 million people likely to come online in the region over the next five years. If current patterns are any indication, a large proportion of those new users will be video gamers.
Carry1st looks to be in a unique position to capitalize on this opportunity, given its position as the biggest producer of social games in Africa. In addition to offering a full-stack publishing platform, the firm produces games that have integrated payment systems as well as online marketplaces to facilitate the monetization of its products.
Raketspel in Sweden and Tilting Point in the United States have publishing agreements with the firm. Tilting Point is the publisher of Nickelodeon's SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off and Nickelodeon's SpongeBob: Krusty Cook-Off.
Africa is swiftly establishing itself as one of the world's largest consumer markets for peer-to-peer payments and decentralized networks, according to the International Payments Association. Payments and transfers using Bitcoin (BTC) have become more popular in many major economies in the area, including Nigeria.
According to Chainalysis, the crypto industry on the continent will have grown by 1,200 percent between 2020 and 2021. Over the next ten years, the gaming industry is predicted to develop at an exponential rate, presenting the new potential for Web3 and play-to-earn business models to flourish.
Over the next decade, according to research conducted by Newzoo and Cary1st, the number of gamers in Sub-Saharan Africa is expected to increase by 275 percent.
Elon Musk, the CEO of top electric vehicle manufacturer Tesla and the world's wealthiest man, has criticized the microblogging network Twitter for including non-financial tokens (NFTs).
Swap coins at a low fee.
Musk began by responding to a Twitter prompt with an explanation of non-ferrous transitions, claiming that it was "annoying."
Following that, he said that the social media platform should focus its efforts on combating frauds rather than on "this bs," a clear reference to non-financial transactions.
In the meanwhile, crypto fraudsters are hosting spambot block parties in every thread, and Twitter is wasting technical resources on this nonsense, Musk lamented.
Earlier last week, it was revealed that Twitter has begun rolling out verified NFT profile image features. It is exclusively accessible to paying customers of Twitter's Blue service, and it enables them to formally validate NFTs that are used as their profile image on the social media platform.
Start crypto investing
A profile photo was formerly available for anybody to use without providing any evidence of ownership by right-clicking on the image and selecting "copy."
