Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) are a special type of digital asset that holds unique attributes, making them non-interchangeable with other tokens within the same class. These tokens derive value as a result of rich metadata, unique transaction histories, and applications that span popular industries including gaming and art.

NFTs first captured the attention of the mainstream crypto community in 2017 with the launch of Ethereum (ETH) collectibles game CryptoKitties. Since then, the popularity of NFTs has steadily increased alongside the growth of the blockchain gaming industry, in addition to the introduction of new and unique use cases for the asset class.

Cut to 2020 and NFTs sit on the cusp of a major adoption and value inflection point, which is why we are now introducing a new player into the blockchain world: Polyient Games.

What is Polyient Games

Polyient Games is the first investment firm and startup ecosystem wholly dedicated to growing the NFT industry. Through a unique hybrid model that leverages both internal venture creation and external venture investments, Polyient Games will source, build and launch the next generation of NFT-driven startups.

Polyient Games was created by the same team behind Polyient Labs, an early-stage business incubator helping blockchain and blockchain-adjacent startups succeed by providing them with capital infusion, insight, guidance and talent.

The structure of Polyient Games consists of two major components:

Core: the firm dedicated to investing in and developing startups. Ecosystem: a collaborative environment consisting of portfolio startups, stakeholders and third-party organizations.

Equally important, the new Ecosystem also provides an industry-first: a chain-agnostic social layer designed to drive collaboration between blockchain games and networks.

What Interests Us

As it stands today, the infrastructure supporting the NFT market is fragmented and relatively immature. Polyient Games’ investment focus is aimed at startups seeking to unlock the full value potential of NFTs.

Specifically, this includes:

Blockchain gaming

Decentralized applications (Dapps)

Developer tools

Crypto art

Virtual reality

Virtual land

Marketplaces

Decentralized finance (DeFi)

Real-world asset tokenization

Polyient has already begun to lay the foundation for this portfolio by investing in several like-minded NFT and blockchain gaming-related startups. This list includes Cargo, a San Francisco-based digital warehouse and marketplace specializing in minting NFT for scalable adoption, and New York-based Blockade Games, a leading blockchain game development studio.

Polyient Games Ecosystem

The Polyient Games Ecosystem will serve as the lifeblood of our growth model, as it doubles both as a proving ground for our startups as well as a means for third-party organizations to expand the reach of their products and build out new collaborative partnerships.

The Ecosystem’s central focus will be exploring and facilitating unique interactions enabled by NFTs. While the immediate application of this focus is gaming, we see massive opportunities across numerous adjacent verticals.

To augment these interactions, we are developing a number of products and incentive systems that will work to aggregate ecosystem participants. Ultimately, we believe our approach will address the ongoing issue of low user adoption that has plagued the industry. (More information on what we have planned will be available in the near future.)

Unlike other blockchain-driven ecosystems, we are building ours from the ground up with one simple idea in mind: openness.

Openness applies in a few different ways:

We are completely chain agonistic. Instead of focusing on any single technology, token standard or network, we are building the Polyient Games Ecosystem from the ground up to act as a social layer that bridges all blockchain gaming communities. Blockchain gaming interoperability: Crossplay and NFT interoperability has so far been limited to one-off collaborations. We aim to incentivize and facilitate the necessary collaborations to help scale this concept. No growth limiting restraints. Companies in the Polyient Games Ecosystem retain complete control over their games and their IP.

Our open approach will take time to fully develop, but it is our belief that this will ultimately function to help unify a subset of the largely fragmented blockchain communities. Given the relatively low adoption numbers for NFTs at this stage, we assert that such an open system is a necessity to reach the coveted goal of mainstream adoption.

If you are developing a game or relevant product and are interested in joining our ecosystem, you can reach out here.

Founder’s Key Sale

To kickstart the Polyient Games Ecosystem, we are introducing a new twist on Founder’s keys.

Founder’s keys are NFTs that reward early supporters of a blockchain game with lifetime perks including early access to pre-launch builds and discounts on future item sales. This founders system works to establish an early user base and build up a community before the official launch of a game.

We have seen firsthand the value of this system and are now taking things a step further to introduce Polyient Games Founder’s Keys (PGFKs), a new collection of NFTs that will provide holders with varying levels of lifetime benefits across the entire Polyient Games Ecosystem.

PGFKs will provide early adopters, including gamers and NFT collectors, with a number of unique perks that will evolve alongside the growth of Polyient Games. This means that instead of holding a key that functions within one game or a piece of land that is tied to a single platform, PGFK holders will enjoy unique rewards from across all games, products and platforms that exist within our ecosystem.

We will be conducting a sale for PGFKs in the near future as a first step towards the official launch of the Polyient Games Ecosystem. More information on the key sale will be available with the release of the Polyient Games whitepaper in the coming months.

Looking Ahead

2020 is going to be a massive year for blockchain gaming, NFTs and Polyient Games. We’re excited to engage with the community and share what we’ve been working on — follow us on Twitter to keep up to date on all the latest news and sign-up for alerts directly on our website.