Ex-Coinbase staff founded NPC Labs raises $21M to build gaming on Base

The $21 million funding effort was led by Pantera Capital, which contributed $18 million, and included funding from Makers Fund, Hashed, Mirana Ventures, and several other investors.

NPC Labs, a GameFi infrastructure startup founded by three former Coinbase employees, has raised $21 million to accelerate gaming development on Coinbase’s Ethereum layer 2 network Base.

The funding included $18 million from cryptocurrency-focused venture capital firm Pantera Capital. Makers Fund, Hashed, Mirana Ventures, and several other investors chipped in, too, according to a July 22 report by VentureBeat, which was reposted on X by NPC.

NPC purports to help developers take their GameFi projects to market and provides developers with more support than what they typically get when dealing with deep-pocketed publishers.

“After spending years creating a game, developers are beholden to publishers to deem their games worthy of support, marketing, and distribution,” NPC’s CEO and former Coinbase business development associate Daryl Xu said. “And when they do, developers give up 70% of the proceeds with the risk of the publisher pulling the game if it’s not generating sufficient revenue.”

Such a setup would return “control” back to the game developers and gamers,” Xu said.

“We want to help build fun games for the mom in Nebraska while making it dead simple for developers to benefit from being onchain.”

To achieve this, NPC will serve as a core contributor to B3, a layer 3 GameFi-focused blockchain built on top of Base, which will handle transactions, gas fees and the bridging of in-game assets.

This way, developers will be able to focus more on deploying fun gameplay, NPC noted.

Choosing Base as the infrastructure to build on top of was an easy choice for NPC, noted the firm’s chief operating officer Viktoriya Hying who, like Xu, previously worked at Coinbase.

NPC’s other founder, Sean Geng, also worked at Coinbase as an engineering manager.