Halliday wants to lower the entry barrier to blockchain gaming. The startup has raised $6 million to offer players “buy now, pay later” NFTs, so they could claim ownership of in-game assets and pay for them over time.
The seed round was led by a16z, with participation from Hashed, SV Angel, Immersion Partners, a_capital, and others.
“It’s quite remarkable that video games, these virtual worlds, now have fully fledged market economies. In these worlds, you have digital property, digital ownership and items with real-world value,” Halliday co-founder and CTO Griffin Dunaif told TechCrunch. “One thing we were struck by was that because these things have real-world value, it can actually be quite difficult to acquire them and have ownership, and one of the fundamental tenets of blockchain is that ownership.”
How will this model work?
- Halliday will buy NFTs from game developers upfront to re-sell them to users on “buy now, pay later” model.
- Players will be able to purchase a digital asset with a Halliday extension at checkout and start using it immediately.
- However, these NFTs will also be “wrapped”, meaning that users won’t be able to sell, transfer it, or hold rights to it.
- Assets purchased with this method will be stored with the company until they are fully paid off. If a user doesn’t pay off their debt on time, Halliday will take back the asset.
- Players will be able to decide how long they need to pay off an asset, with the average terms being around 1-3 months.
- The company will also charge a fee to cover the costs. But it also plans to eliminate the commission over time.
- The fee size and other monetization details remain undisclosed at the time.
The beta version of Halliday will come out in a few weeks, with the full public launch expected to take place shortly after the beta.