Binance bets on a gaming NFT metaverse where players can mate their pet sharks

• Crypto exchange Binance said Tuesday its venture capital arm has invested in blockchain game startup Star Sharks.
• Players can own, trade and mate the underlying shark NFTs as they compete in its game's metaverse.
• The Star Sharks makers' games have drawn in 1 million players a day and are part of the growing crypto gaming space.

Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, is backing a blockchain game startup's shark metaverse as interest in virtual worlds becomes more mainstream.

Its venture capital arm and incubator Binance Labs has placed a "strategic investment" of just under $1 million in Star Sharks, the company told Insider.

Star Sharks's first game enables players to compete for rewards by trading and even mating the pet sharks they own, in the form of underlying shark non-fungible tokens (NFTs) on a 3D mobile platform.

Players in "Starsharks.Warriors" join forces to build and run a new shark-metaverse as a community, according to Binance Labs. It is set to debut this month.

Built on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) blockchain, the decentralized game reflects a growing interest in the metaverse, as with Facebook's recent decision to change its corporate name to "Meta." A metaverse is a virtual space where people can interact digitally using avatars.

"After launching their GameFi platform on Binance Smart Chain (BSC), we believe that Star Sharks will be an important contributor to the development of the gaming sector and therefore benefit all users in the BSC ecosystem," Chase Guo, investment director at Binance Labs, was quoted as saying in a company statement.

Binance Labs said its investment would help expand the gaming sector on its BSC network. It launched the BSC network for decentralized, peer-to-peer applications in October last year.

The team behind Star Sharks came in part from Timi Studio Group, whose games have pulled in more than 1 million users a day within three months, and from Google.

GameFi, where decentralized finance meets the gaming industry, is pulling a lot of attention from the crypto community and from the biggest gaming guilds in the sector.

Its business model often allows players to obtain a share of the dividends brought in from game development, with their most common feature being "play to earn". Ethereum-based game "Axie Infinity" is one of the most popular GameFi projects.

In the Star Sharks first game, those who refer new players will get tokens based on the activity rewards of the people they have referred.