Metaverse Magna lands $3.2M seed to build Africa’s largest crypto gaming community

Nestcoin's blockchain gaming platform, Metaverse Magna (MVM) has secured a $3.2 million seed fund to build Africa's largest gaming decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs).

Several investors including; Wemade, Tess Ventures, LD Capital, Taureon, Gumi Cryptos Capital, HashKey, AFF, Polygon Studios, Casper Johansen (Spartan), and IndiGG participated in the round.

Since its launch in December 2021, MVM has grown to over 100,000 members across its products and community. MVM added earning opportunities for competitive and casual gamers, allowing them to earn from free-to-play web2 games they already love. To facilitate this, MVM is building a soon-to-launch social gaming app called Hyper.

Nestcoin incubated MVM in partnership with Old Fashion Research, a multi-strategy blockchain investment fund. With this latest funding, MVM is pushing to cement itself as Africa's pioneering and largest gaming network. "By 2023, we would love to see MVM leading the social gaming conversation in Africa, unlocking opportunities not just for gamers, but also for game developers," Yele Bademosi, Nestcoin's co-founder and CEO said.

In Nigeria, play-to-earn (P2E) gaming adoption has been projected to reach 33% by the end of 2023. Nigeria currently ranks 9th globally for P2E adoption but Finder's cryptocurrency editor, Keegan Francis, said forecast adoption will move it up to 5th: "Nigeria is set to experience the biggest jump in P2E NFT gaming adoption of any country included in the study, followed by Peru (16%) and The Philippines (14%)."

According to MVM's General Manager, Yemi Johnson, "this investment is a huge leap in creating value for all our stakeholders and facilitating the expansion of MVM's operations to provide opportunities for casual gamers through Hyper, our social gaming app with an embedded virtual wallet."

Earlier in February, Nestcoin raised $6.45 million in pre-seed capital to accelerate crypto and web3 adoption. Even though Africa still trails the rest of the world in crypto adoption, growth is evident. According to Chainalysis' report on crypto in Africa, the continent's cryptocurrency market has grown by almost 1,200% in the last year — more than any other region. This growth puts Africa's crypto ecosystem value at $105.6 billion as of the time of the report.

When Metaverse Magna, MVM unveiled its P2E scholarship programme, Bademosi said that "Play-to-Earn has the potential to drive mass adoption of crypto in Africa, approximately 40% of 1.2 billion Africans are below the poverty line so the opportunity to help 250 million gamers on the continent earns up to $1,000 a month is a worthy mission in our quest to drive economic transformation on the continent."

Aside from MVM, the company launched Breach in 2021 to drive crypto adoption on the continent through education, Breach now has over 100K subscribers.

Editor's Note: The article was updated to reflect the current number of Breach subscribers which currently stands at 100,000 instead of 6000. (15:38 GMT. September 5, 2022).