Harmony invests as lead technology partner in acquisition of Sequoia-funded company Quidd
High-performance blockchain Harmony joins mobile gaming company Animoca Brands as strategic technology partner in the acquisition of Quidd, a Sequoia-funded digital collectible startup.
Animoca Brands has bet on blockchain gaming since its involvement in CryptoKitties in 2018. Crypto-collectibles are poised to be one of the first applications to go mainstream. In June of this year, Animoca Brands released the world’s first Formula 1 NFT — the “1-1-1” — which sold at auction for 415.9 ether (worth approximately $113,000 at time of sale).
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In 2017, Quidd raised $13m in venture funding led by Sequoia to build a digital collectible mobile app. Today, Quidd has 325 brand licenses including Game of Thrones, Rick and Morty, and Marvel superheroes. Quidd has issued and sold over 2.1 billion individually-serialized digital collectibles, and generated over $10m in gross revenues from its community of digital collectors.
Although CryptoKitties might be an inspiration for this move, this time would be different. CryptoKitties faced issues when it clogged the Ethereum network, but Harmony’s scalable infrastructure would not face the same issue.
At its peak, CryptoKitties had 14,000 users, straining the Ethereum network’s throughput of 14 transactions per second. By comparison, Quidd currently has 200,000 users, requiring significantly more throughput than what Ethereum can provide. Harmony’s sharded blockchain supports 10,000 transactions per second–more than enough to support Quidd,
However, Animoca Brands and Harmony likely seek to grow Quidd far beyond its current size. Fortunately, sharded blockchains can scale up their throughput to match demand for the applications running on them. Harmony’s network will not break if Quidd goes viral, in fact, it can grow to support the new users.
“We are excited to deepen our engagement with Animoca Brands through our support of its acquisition of Quidd. Stay tuned for further announcements on our plans for this partnership,” says Harmony co-founder Nick White.
Harmony is a fast and secure blockchain. Built by a team of engineers from Google, Apple, Amazon, Harvard and Stanford, Harmony helps businesses build marketplaces of fungible tokens (such as energy credits and loyalty points) and non-fungible assets (such as game collectibles and real estate). Harmony has a robust ecosystem building strategy focused on creating partnerships that drive adoption of the protocol. At scale, Harmony helps businesses tokenize their assets and incentivize user engagement. For more information visit https://harmony.one/ or join Twitter or Telegram
Animoca Brands (ASX: AB1) leverages gamification, blockchain, and artificial intelligence technologies to develop and publish a broad portfolio of mobile products including games such as The Sandbox, Crazy Kings, and Crazy Defense Heroes as well as products based on popular intellectual properties such as Formula 1®, Garfield, Snoopy, Thomas & Friends™, Ever After High and Doraemon. Animoca Brands’ portfolio of blockchain investments and partnerships includes Lucid Sight, Dapper Labs (creators of CryptoKitties), WAX, Harmony, and Decentraland. The Company is based in Hong Kong, Canada, Finland, and Argentina. For more information visit www.animocabrands.com or get updates by following Animoca Brands on Facebook or Twitter.
Quidd is the leading platform for buying, trading, and displaying premium, rare digital goods. Available for free on iOS and Android devices, the Quidd app enables fans to buy, own, and use digital stuff, like stickers, GIFs, cards and toys, to express their fandoms, construct their identities, and have more fun with their favorite things. The best names in entertainment, including Marvel, Hasbro, Game Of Thrones, Sanrio, Rick And Morty, Michael Jackson, Major League Baseball and more, are using the Quidd platform to reach new audiences and build new businesses. Quidd is backed by Sequoia Capital with headquarters in NYC. For more information, visit Quidd.co.
