Animoca & Harmony Partner Up to Acquire $13 Million Dollar Sequoia Funded Digital Collectible Company
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Animoca & Harmony Partner Up to Acquire $13 Million Dollar Sequoia Funded Digital Collectible Company
High-performance blockchain Harmony and mobile gaming company Animoca Brands have teamed up to acquire Quidd, a $13 million Sequoia-funded digital collectible startup.
Animoca has bet big on blockchain gaming since its involvement in CryptoKitties in 2017. Crypto-collectibles are poised to be one of the first applications to go mainstream. In June of this year, Animoca released the world’s first Formula 1 NFT – the “1-1-1” – via auction and raised US$106,428. In July, the CryptoKitties founders teamed up with the NBA to release a new batch of crypto-collectibles.
In 2017, Quidd raised $13m in venture funding led by Sequoia to build a digital collectible mobile app. Since then, Quidd secured 325 brand licenses including Game of Thrones, Rick and Morty, and Marvel superheroes while growing to a peak of over 800k users. The platform has hosted more than five million trades involving a total of 60 million individual items with a combined value of over $10m.
Harmony and Animoca’s strategic acquisition of Quidd is intended to form the cornerstone of a new crypto-collectible ecosystem. Animoca plans to add its large portfolio of brands and games to the Quidd platform following the acquisition.
Although CryptoKitties may be an inspiration for this move, this time is different. Having learned from the issues CryptoKitties faced when it clogged the Ethereum network, Harmony’s scalable infrastructure is scalable lies at the core of this new venture.
At its peak, CryptoKitties had 14,000 users, straining the Ethereum network’s throughput of 14 transactions per second. By comparison, Quidd currently has 200,000 users, requiring significantly more throughput than what Ethereum can provide. Harmony’s sharded blockchain supports 10,000 transactions per second–more than enough to support Quidd,
However, Animoca and Harmony seek to grow Quidd far beyond its current size. Fortunately, sharded blockchains can scale up their throughput to match demand for the applications running on them. Harmony’s network will not break if Quidd goes viral, in fact, it will grow to support the new users.
About Harmony
Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain. Built by a team of engineers from Google, Apple, Amazon, Harvard and Stanford, Harmony helps businesses build marketplaces of fungible tokens (such as energy credits and loyalty points) and non-fungible assets (such as game collectibles and real estate). Harmony has a robust ecosystem building strategy focused on creating partnerships that drive adoption of the protocol. At scale, Harmony helps businesses tokenize their assets and incentivize user engagement.
For more information visit https://harmony.one/ or join Twitter or Telegram.
About Animoca Brands
Animoca Brands (ASX: AB1) leverages gamification, blockchain, and artificial intelligence technologies to develop and publish a broad portfolio of mobile products including games such as The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes as well as products based on popular intellectual properties such as Formula 1®, Garfield, Snoopy, Thomas & Friends™, Ever After High and Doraemon. Animoca Brands’ portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships includes Lucid Sight, Dapper Labs (creators of CryptoKitties), WAX, Harmony, and Decentraland.
The Company is based in Hong Kong, Canada, Finland, and Argentina. For more information visit www.animocabrands.com or get updates by following Animoca Brands on Facebook or Twitter.
About Quidd
Quidd is the leading platform for buying, trading, and displaying premium, rare digital goods. Available for free on iOS and Android devices, the Quidd app enables fans to buy, own, and use digital stuff, like stickers, GIFs, cards and toys, to express their fandoms, construct their identities, and have more fun with their favorite things.
The best names in entertainment, including Marvel, Hasbro, Game Of Thrones, Sanrio, Rick And Morty, Michael Jackson, Major League Baseball and more, are using the Quidd platform to reach new audiences and build new businesses. Quidd is backed by Sequoia Capital with headquarters in NYC. For more information, visit Quidd.co.