Framework Ventures to Invest Half of New $400 Million Fund in Blockchain Gaming

Framework Ventures has secured $400 million for a third fund, with half of that dedicated to investments in blockchain gaming.

The fund, FVIII, is earmarking up to $200 million for blockchain gaming, which, the firm said today in a statement, will be “one of the largest forms of employment in the world.”

San Francisco-based two-man band Framework now manages around $1.4 billion in assets. Led by Michael Anderson and Vance Spencer, the venture capital firm is heavily focused on DeFi—and strongly believes blockchain-based games will be just as big.

“We go where the entrepreneurs go, and right now we’re spending most of our time focused on gaming and gaming-related infrastructure companies and publishers, guilds, and everything around the gaming ecosystem,” Anderson told Decrypt in an interview.

“In the next few years [blockchain] gaming is going to be something that bursts onto the scene in the same way DeFi did in 2019 and 2020,” he added.

Decrypt’s People of the Year: the DeFi Degens

On September 28, Andre Cronje, the influential and unpredictable developer behind Yearn.Finance, which turns users’ cryptocurrency investments into (often) large financial returns, retweeted an image. It was from a recently created account called Eminence.Finance, and it read, simply, “Spartans.” pic.twitter.com/tV9LSzPXlV — eminence.finance (@eminencefi) September 28, 2020 At that point, a single Yearn Finance token was worth over $28,000 and Cronje was a decentralized finance god who had hel...

In a separate statement, the firm said “billions of people” will be “attracted to the allure and access of better economic opportunities found in entirely new digital universes.”

Games built on blockchain technology are part of a growing ecosystem that wants to create in-game economies where players can buy, sell, and trade things like non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrencies. NFTs are unique digital tokens that prove ownership of things like art or music files. 

Framework is still betting big elsewhere: The other half of its new fund likely will be used for both DeFi (decentralized finance) and Web3 startups and networks. “DeFi” refers to apps that want to make borrowing, lending, and other traditional bank functions automated and decentralized. DeFi apps and their native tokens became very popular in 2020 and helped push up the price of the two biggest cryptocurrencies, BitcoinBitcoin and EthereumEthereum.