Merit Circle is pleased to announce the successful end of its seed round, which raised $4.5 million from experienced venture capitalists and strategic partners. The recently formed decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) will consist of industry-leading names working together to revolutionize the play-to-earn (P2E) gaming model.

A decade ago, the global gaming industry was estimated to be worth around $52.8 billion. Today, it’s thought its true value, including software, hardware, content and IP, could be as much as $335.5 billion worldwide.

With growth comes innovation and, thanks to the decentralized nature of blockchain technology, a novel, fairer business model for games emerged: play-to-earn – why pay to play a game when you can play a game to earn?

An excellent example of this is Merit Circle’s original game, Axie Infinity. What launched as a small operation in March 2018 quickly grew to become the largest play-to-earn game to date with over 2 million daily active users. It also led to the creation of Merit Circle, a DAO with the aim of becoming a dominant player in the play-to-earn industry.

A recent seed round enabled us at Merit Circle to raise significant capital to scale up operations.

Just some of our investors include DeFiance Capital, Mechanism Capital, Spartan Group, Maven11, OP Crypto, Dialectic, CitizenX, Yield Guild Games and Bitscale Capital.

Merit Circle’s journey is a long term one, investing in more games with the same potential as Axie Infinity. Many of the new games in our sights at Merit Circle are still in the development phase, giving us as the DAO time to prepare by conducting extensive research, finding the right players and acquiring substantial amounts of NFTs to enter these metaverses the right way.

As well as Axie Infinity, Merit Circle has formed strong partnerships with Star Atlas, Illuvium, Hash Rush and NyanHeroes to work collaboratively towards a sustainable future for play-to-earn and we’re proud to have the support of some of the largest names in the industry.

“The latest seed round, which we’re delighted to say was hugely oversubscribed, enabled us to select only those who would contribute to our long term success as a DAO, with a focus on four main principles:

• Experience – we want to create an organization consisting of those who have both a long-term vision for Merit Circle, as well as a thorough understanding of the industry and governance models. Plus, we chose to work solely with funds that have been around for longer to protect the viability of our project and actively participate in DAO governance.
• Industry connections – we want partners who will enable us to collaboratively uplift the metaverse in numerous ways, be it through collective game tournaments, real-life events, giveaways, exclusive in-game airdrops or early access to those AAA games.
• Diversification – Merit Circle is a global organization with scholars and team members all over the world. We’re also delighted that we have backers from Asia, Europe, Australia and the United States to help inform a governance forum that’s diverse, knowledgeable and aware of the latest developments in any and every region.
• Sustainable long term vision – the most important factor might be the strong long-term vision of each and every investor we have onboarded. The play-to-earn industry is still in its infancy; we are here to help it mature.

We’re grateful for our many industry-leading investors and are determined to work with them to revolutionize ways of earning for the masses. Our governance forum will be established in the coming weeks and this will bring us closer to launching our token. We’ll also be releasing more information about a public investment round in the near future.”

To stay up to date on our adventure, follow Merit Circle in these channels:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/MeritCircle_IO
Discord: http://discord.gg/meritcircle
Telegram: https://t.me/meritcircle
Website: http://meritcircle.io/