Santa Clara, CA, September 12th, 2024,
Chainwire
CARV is launching a $50 million accelerator to
incubate projects capable of driving the mass adoption of its
eponymous data protocol.
With backing from top blockchain VC funds, including HashKey Capital and Consensys, the modular
data layer for gaming and AI has pledged to support innovators,
particularly those actively building the future of decentralized
data.
Backed by CARV Protocol, the accelerator’s
mission is to enable a dynamic, decentralized data infrastructure
that empowers users to control and monetize their data. It will
provide comprehensive support to startups, including funding and
investment backed by leading industry funds, go-to-market and
growth support, expert tokenomics advisory, infrastructure and
tooling tech advice, and access to the company’s industry network
and community.
“Our goal is to enable a decentralized data ecosystem
for broader innovation,” said CARV Co-Founder Victor Yu. “Building
sustainable data infrastructure hinges on creating a dynamic data
flywheel, which requires modular infrastructure and a critical mass
of high-quality applications post-PMF. To push for the next hockey
stick, we want to further encourage building by more
players.”
As well as direct funding and investment, CARV Labs will supply
marketing and growth support, plus tokenomics advisory services,
community-building, and prioritized infrastructure and tooling
support from CARV and its network partners.
Current industry investors set to play a role in the
accelerator’s vertical-specific programs include MARBLEX, the web3
arm of South Korean mobile game developer Netmarble; Intella X, the
Web3 Publishing arm of South Korea’s Global Game Developer and
Publisher NEOWIZ, the crowdfunding platform Alphastarter; Doublejump.tokyo, the developer behind
the Oasys blockchain; various business angels; game publisher
Xterio; Solana, NEAR and Ronin networks.
Additional partners such as Arweave, Litentry, the Linea Ecosystem Investment
Alliance (LEIA), and Alibaba Cloud will also promote the
accelerator. Linea, the secure zkEVM L2 that empowers dapps
to thrive, will further market a web3 gaming offer later this year
that will connect to the accelerator.
The first project incubated under CARV Labs, BANANA, an idle game
built on the TON ecosystem, attracted over 8M users
within just 4 weeks with more than 1M daily active users, 1.8M
social accounts connected, and 73M social tasks completed. The
rapid success of BANANA underscores CARV Labs' effectiveness in
fostering innovation and driving user engagement in decentralized
applications. This milestone showcases the potential for future
projects and positions CARV Labs as a leader in the space.
The groundswell of applications building on the protocol has
enabled CARV to generate over $5 million in revenue YTD, with more
games and projects in the pipeline. Last month, it announced the
launch of its Alphanet, run by the
40K verifier nodes distributed to its community worth $35M. The
milestone was considered an important one as CARV evolves into a
truly decentralized and scalable protocol layer. Alphanet’s arrival
followed April’s Series A funding round,
led by Tribe Capital and IOSG Ventures, which attracted $10
million.
Gaming, AI, and data infrastructure projects interested in
finding out more about the new accelerator are advised to reach out
via CARV’s official Discord channel.
About CARV
CARV is building the largest modular Identity and Data Layer
(IDL) for gaming, AI, and beyond, integrating over 900 games and AI
companies, representing more than 30% of all Web3 games, and
serving 9.5M+ registered players with 1.3M+ daily active users and
2.8M unique on-chain CARV ID holders. Ranking among the top three
globally with 2.1M+ average daily unique active wallets across 40+
chains, CARV has raised $50M in total funding from top-tier
investors like Tribe Capital, Temasek Vertex, HashKey Capital,
Animoca Brands, and ConsenSys, along with major gaming studios and
ecosystems such as MARBLEX (Netmarble) and the Sandbox. The team
comprises industry veterans from Coinbase, Binance, Google, and
Electronic Arts, all dedicated to revolutionizing data usage in
gaming, AI, and beyond.
About HashKey Capital
HashKey Capital is a global digital asset and blockchain leader
helping institutions, founders and talents advance the blockchain
industry. As one of the largest crypto fund managers and being the
earliest corporate investor in Ethereum, HashKey Capital has
managed over US$1 billion in client assets since its inception.
Leveraging its unparalleled expertise, HashKey Capital's venture
investments team oversees a diversified portfolio of over 600
pioneering projects across institutional services, infrastructure,
data, AI, consumer services/ technology and more.
About Consensys
Consensys is the leading blockchain and web3 software
company. Since 2014, Consensys has been at the forefront of
innovation, pioneering technological developments within the web3
ecosystem. Through our product suite, including the MetaMask platform,
Infura, Linea, Diligence, and our NFT toolkit Phosphor, we have become the trusted
collaborator for users, creators, and developers on their path to
build and belong in the world they want to see. Whether building a
dapp, an NFT collection, a portfolio, or a better future, the
instinct to build is universal. Consensys inspires and champions
the builder instinct in everyone by making web3 universally easy to
use and develop on. To explore our products and solutions, visit
https://consensys.io/.
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Contact
COO
Victor
Y.
vito@carv.io