What are the highlights of the blockchain gaming platform Balance, which has been invested in twice by a16z?

Written by Haotian

Recently, @Balance_Fun launched a Key Node sales event for the upcoming TGE. I won’t go into too much detail about the benefits, investment returns, and participation rights for Node holders. What I want to talk about is what Balance is doing as a project. Why did a16z invest heavily in it twice? How does it connect the web2 ‘companion’ platform with the booming web3 gaming industry, and so on?

1）Balance is a blockchain game experience platform launched by the E-PAL game companion platform. In the web2 world, companionship has become a huge market, where users can find someone to improve their gaming skills, find someone to socialize with to enhance the gaming experience, and so on. Ultimately, these people gather together to generate platform scale effects, becoming potential audiences and brand amplifiers for other game developers and operators, thus demonstrating greater economic and commercial value attributes.

In other words, users in the playmate market are naturally a group of “money-making on the Internet”, familiar with various points, growth incentives and other gameplay, they can naturally become potential incremental users of web3 games and Tokenomics, which can be said to have the attribute of self-contained Mass Adoption.

Balance is a web3 Native game service platform designed based on blockchain to bridge the gap between web2 and web3, just like E-PAL. With millions of users on the E-PAL ‘play with’ platform, any game application and service connected to this game service platform can find decent commercial value, including cultivating early loyal users, establishing early game communities, and building a free and open player trading market, etc.

2. YGG (Yield Guild Games), as a DAO gaming guild organization, is still vividly remembered by everyone in the GameFi boom sparked by the Play-to-Earn model in the previous cycle. The past glory and market performance of YGG are also well known to all.

The operation logic of YGG is also very simple. It is based on the player pool of the game guild to invest in NFTs and other related assets of web3 games, and then through core asset leasing, $YGG Token incentives and other means to create a positive business flywheel, and finally make it a web3 game traffic entrance platform and early game community incubator full of imagination space.

Personally, I feel that the market positioning and brand of Balance are very similar to YGG, and in some ways, even superior to YGG, in terms of its global user base, product service coverage, and commercial imagination space. However, YGG has capitalized on the major trends of Non-fungible Token, GameFI, and Metaverse, while Balance is still waiting for its opportunity. Moreover, a16z, which made a fruitful investment in YGG initially, has once again heavily invested in Balance, indicating its clear intention and ambition.

Although most of the time the game track is unremarkable, there may be a phenomenal game that will explode the market at any time, which is the highlight moment that platforms like Balance have been waiting for.

3. As far as I know, many platforms including @Orbiter_Finance cross-chain bridges, @carv_official game identity data protocol platform, @sophon RPC Node service platform, etc., have adopted the Node sales strategy. Node sales itself is also the result of web3 platforms commercializing their prospects after Tokenomics.

Based on this, it can achieve the goals of rapid financing, binding core users, and forming a community of interests, which can be understood as an “internal public sale” before TGE, which is suitable for such projects with a clear commercial closed-loop path and a certain accumulation of potential users and market resources.

Balance has accumulated $30M in financing, with investment institutions such as a16z, Galaxy Interactive, and other top-tier industry players. The platform has 12 million registered users, over 2 million daily active users, and has established partnerships with more than 80 web3 gaming companies, supporting over 180 games, and so on.

Apparently, it is these solid operation and maintenance data and rise situation that have given birth to this Node sale plan and the subsequent TGE. As for what kind of performance can be achieved, and how high the Secondary Market can reach, it depends on when the game track draws attention and Bull Market Main Rising Wave.