Oasys: Why Republic Capital led their seed round

I’m excited to share that Republic Capital led Oasys’s $20M round, with participation from Jump Crypto, Crypto.com, Fenbushi Capital, Huobi, Infinity Ventures, Kucoin, and several others.

Oasys is an elegant layer-1 blockchain explicitly designed for gaming. Through its EVM L1 and private L2 roll ups, Oasys creates an attractive solution for large and indie gaming studios to deploy their games and intellectual property on-chain.

Partnerships with legacy entertainment companies

For the first time ever, Sega, Bandai Namco Research, Ubisoft, and several other notable game studios are running validators (securing the network) for a blockchain. The Oasys core members have been working on blockchain gaming since 2018, and many of Oasys' team members come from the Japanese gaming industry, which is why they were able to partner with large entertainment companies. Notably, Oasys spent the greater part of the last two years convincing these large video game developers to adopt blockchain technology. Now that these studios are on board, I believe that we are at the very beginning of a mass adoption phase for web3 gaming. If these large companies were to put a fraction of their IP (intellectual property) on-chain, it could attract millions of new crypto users.

Crypto has a high learning curve

Although blockchain technology enables gamers to exchange their assets easily without a middleman, crypto is often intimidating for new users. Figuring out the difference between a public key and a private key, storing your private key safely, and worrying about transaction fees are huge points of stress for new crypto users. 

Gamers and game developers should not have to worry about the hurdles of crypto. This is not to say that Oasys won’t have games that will require logging in with a wallet, but developers should have the option to make logging into their games the traditional way – an email and password. 

Oasys solves many of the pains of crypto onboarding via the private L2s built on top of its L1. By utilizing L2s, gamers will enjoy fast transactions—which is important for gaming—and the luxury of not having to pay transaction fees on the L2s. This is because L2s bundle transactions together, and validators (in this case, the gaming studios) will pay for the L2 transaction fees. All of this makes a much more enjoyable gaming experience, where gamers won’t have to feel like they are being squeezed for their hard-earned fiat by studios. Additionally, private chains make legacy studios more comfortable because they can control the user experience more and make it feel like a traditional gaming experience. Gamers can simply focus on having fun and still own the assets they earn while playing. This does not mean that on-chain games are not fun, but many games can be ruined by requiring gamers to pay for transaction fees.

History doesn't repeat, but it does rhyme

Back in the early 80s, the video game market’s first boom went bust. Several factors are attributed to the cause of the crash: a flooding of the market with consoles, hundreds of poorly developed games, a lack of IP controls, and a growing interest in personal computers. As a result, retail demand for video games quickly dried up, and many believed that the video game industry would never recover. However, what brought the video game industry back from the grave was a consolidation of consoles on the market, the protection of video game IP, higher quality games, and PC gaming. We believe the same trend is playing out in the blockchain gaming space, but at a faster rate.

In short, we believe that Oasys has built a revolutionary technology that lowers barriers to entry to the blockchain gaming space, consolidates the ecosystem, and provides protections to the IP of the games built on top for game developers. We are still very much in the early stages of blockchain based games, and we are excited to work with Oasys to bring their technology into the mainstream of the gaming industry.

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