NPC Labs Raises $18M to Scale Gaming on Base Network

NPC Labs, a developer looking to build a GameFi ecosystem on the Base protocol, has closed an $18 million funding round led by Pantera Capital.

In an interview with CoinDesk, NPC Labs’ co-founder Daryl Xu, explained that the company’s mission is to scale gaming on Base by acting as a core contributor to B3.fun, a Base gaming ecosystem, and building GameFi products that are accessible to non-crypto native users.

“Right now, everyone in crypto is building great applications, but they are primarily targeting crypto-native folks. There are a lot of crypto buzzwords like wallets and LPs being used,” Xu said. “For the average person – the ‘Normie’ we hope to onboard as the next million or billion users – they don’t necessarily care about the technical details. They just want a fun and accessible experience.”

Xu said that NPC Labs plans to use the funds to kickstart the ecosystem, and part of that is building out more ways for non-Web3 users to discover crypto gaming. Part of that involves building out discovery portals such as Basement.fun, to help users get into these games.

“[Basement.fun] is meant to be a discovery portal for games. Think of it like Miniclip or Addicting Games, those old HTML5 and Flash game websites,” he said. “That’s what we’re trying to build. The experience will be very simple: you jump on the web app and can immediately start playing without going through a lot of hoops.”

According to a release, B3 is currently in the testnet and supports games built on Ethereum, Base, and other EVM chains.

Other participants in the round were Collab+Currency, Sfermion, Mirana Ventures, Bitscale Capital, and Mantle EcoFund.