Author: Karen, Foresight News

As a hotbed for developers and capital, the Web3 gaming sector is nurturing endless possibilities. Today, we will introduce B3.fun, a game ecosystem built on Base, which has attracted significant attention from both developers and capital. The team behind B3.fun, NPC Labs, announced the completion of a $21 million Pre-Seed and Seed round of financing this month.

B3 is not only an L3 network on Base, but also an all-in-one game store. NPC Labs believes that by providing both entertaining and highly engaging casual and hyper-casual gaming experiences, serving as a one-stop shop for game developers, they can deeply engage a wide player base while benefiting both developers and players.

NPC Labs' Three Co-founders All Have Backgrounds in Coinbase and Base

NPC Labs is the core contributor to B3.fun, an ecosystem built on Base, which can be seen as an L3 on Base, dedicated to establishing a seamless, open gaming ecosystem that changes ownership and incentive models for game players and developers.

On July 23, NPC Labs announced the completion of an $18 million seed round of financing, with participation from Makers Fund, Hashed, Collab+Currency, Mirana Ventures, Sfermion, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund. Combined with the Pre-Seed round of financing, NPC Labs has raised a total of $21 million, with angel investors from Coinbase, Base, Optimism, Bybit, NFT card game Parallel, Yield Guild Games, Proof of Play, Delphi Venture, and others.

It is worth mentioning that NPC Labs' three co-founders all have backgrounds in Coinbase and Base. They left their previous employer at the end of March this year and co-founded NPC Labs in April, quickly launching the testnet last month. The three co-founders are:

1. Daryl Xu: Former core contributor at Base, former business development manager at Coinbase, now CEO at NPC Labs;
2. Viktoriya Hying: Former business development manager at Coinbase Base, now Chief Operating Officer at NPC Labs;
3. Sean Geng: Former engineering manager at Coinbase, now Chief Technology Officer at NPC Labs.

According to The Block, NPC Labs currently has 5 employees and plans to expand cross-functional departments such as engineering, marketing, and market promotion, to expand the team to 10 people. In a report by VentureBeat, Viktoriya Hying clearly expressed the company's core vision, "We are ensuring that we can operate stably and achieve our goals. This financing will allow us to maintain a high degree of flexibility and vigilance in the face of future fluctuations, especially in a possible bear market environment, without being distracted by funding issues. Our goal is to launch 100 games on B3 within the next 12 months."

What is B3.fun?

NPC Labs CEO Daryl Xu introduced B3.fun as a Layer3 ecosystem built on Base, similar to a microservices architecture that can support high-frequency transaction processing per second and achieve a transaction environment with minimal gas fees. More importantly, with ChainSafe's chain abstraction technology, B3.fun allows users to enjoy a smoother gaming experience without worrying about cross-chain or network switching issues.

B3.fun aims to provide a simple, frictionless entry experience for blockchain games and aims to become a one-stop shop for game developers, running infrastructure for developers and helping them with marketing and distribution so they can focus on developing interesting games. The B3 mainnet will be launched later.

Currently, in the testnet phase, B3 can already provide initial support for games developed on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM-compatible chains, and plans to introduce support for more blockchains in the future. B3 will also have the potential to integrate games from other blockchains such as Solana.

In addition, B3 has established partnerships with over 350 non-custodial wallet service providers, data visualization platforms and data providers, as well as on-ramps and oracle services, aiming to provide more direct and convenient solutions for game developers.

What Games are Currently Available on the B3 Testnet?

When asked if B3 will also launch its own token when it goes live on the mainnet, Daryl Xu stated that this decision depends on the foundation. B3 also explicitly states on its website that participating in the B3 testnet does not entitle you to any rewards on the mainnet, but you can compete on the game leaderboard. Here are a few games available on the B3 testnet:

1. Dino Runner: A 3D endless running game where players control a dinosaur to continuously run, jump, dodge obstacles, and survive to earn DINO.
2. PEWPEW TAP: Tap to fire, tap to earn, tap to conquer. Players shoot lasers to generate unique hash values and earn PEWPEW tokens on the chain.
3. Neighborhood Defense: Players face zombie invasions in this tower defense game, strategically building and upgrading archer towers, bomber towers, electric towers, and sniper towers to protect their community and earn ZOMB tokens. Additionally, the game also features another token, COINZ.
4. Key Quest: Players jump to grab keys to pass levels. Additionally, grabbing stars scattered in each level earns STARS.
5. Pixel Zombie Crush: Players earn ZOMB by crushing zombies before they reach the bottom of the screen.
6. Fruit Merge: A matching puzzle game where players merge matching types of fruits to earn JUICE.
7. Don't Crash: The longer players drive the vehicle, the more CRASH tokens they earn.

All of these games are available for web and mobile, and in addition to these, there are several Mac desktop games and Telegram games available on the B3 testnet, such as the Telegram game Pinball. Viktoriya Hying stated, "Many of the games we release on the mainnet will be Telegram games and instances, aiming to simplify the process and make it a sticky and fun experience."

However, as of yesterday, when logging in, all of the above games were showing "invalid session" and loading, so it is unclear whether this was a bug. Today, these games have returned to normal. However, the process of entering the games is currently quite slow, but the gaming experience is relatively smooth.

Interaction Strategy

1. Obtain B3 testnet test coins by connecting your wallet and clicking the white dot (https://faucet.b3.fun/);
2. Obtain Base Sepolia test coins:

• https://faucet.quicknode.com/base/sepolia
• or https://www.alchemy.com/faucets/base-sepolia
• or https://console.optimism.io/faucet

1. Cross-chain (deposit and withdraw):

• https://bridge.b3.fun/#

1. Create Avatar NFT (in ERC1155 format). Avatars can be automatically generated in 3D or pixel art style, or manually uploaded. The avatar generation process takes about 1 minute.
2. Play the aforementioned games. Before playing, you need to mint in the testnet.

In summary, NPC Labs, founded in April this year, has completed financing and launched the testnet in about 3 months. The current testnet also features multiple games, and while the gaming experience still needs improvement, it demonstrates the team's execution and efficiency. Although the exploration of each game and the establishment of each game ecosystem are important forces driving the continuous development of the Web3 gaming sector, for NPC Labs, whether they can continue to make progress and achieve a leading position in this field in the future, we still need to observe.

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