Stardust recently acquired $30M in funding from a Series A round led by Framework Ventures. The company provides developer tools to game creators for building blockchain games with less code. The funding round was joined by Acrew Capital, Blockchain Capital, and Distributed Global. Stardust aims to become the de-facto infrastructure layer on which blockchain games are built.
The company has not yet announced its valuation after completing the funding round but has said that the amount is higher than it was in its previous funding round. In 2021, Stardust acquired $5M from the same company, Framework Ventures, for its platform to enable players to buy NFTs in games using US dollars.
The announcement of the Stardust funding comes at a time when overall VC investing is down in the case of crypto startups. But Framework Ventures believes Stardust’s infrastructure will help bridge the gap between web2 gamers and web3 games. Stardust has also teamed up with game publisher Tilting Point to help their developers build blockchain games.
What is Stardust?
Stardust is a scalable NFT infrastructure for blockchain games. It allows developers to build and integrate NFTs into their games with fewer lines of code. The Stardust API helps you easily mint, burn, transfer NFTs and manage marketplaces, making it easier for any web2 developer to create blockchain games. Developers can also choose one or multiple blockchains after building the entire application.
The platform also offers a powerful NFT marketplace management system with NFT trading, time-based auctions, multi-chain support, mitigating compliance risk, and many other features.
The Stardust Developer Dashboard is a centralized system for developers that help manage games, NFTs, and players. It allows developers to create more types of NFTs, gain insights about who owns them, see game metrics such as the number of tokens created, sold, and traded, and monitor player count. In addition, the company uses Fireblocks, a digital asset security platform, to split and distribute private keys, thus protecting in-game assets from user error and malfunctions.
Stardust was founded as a startup by CEO Canaan Linder in 2018. He previously worked as a software engineer for Bloomberg LP. The company currently has a 40-person team and charges game creators a monthly per-player cost. Stardust also powers 20 games in beta testing and enables developers to launch scalable in-game economies across various blockchains with institutional-grade security.