Japan’s gaming blockchain builder Oasys raises $20M in private token sale

techcrunch.com:

Veterans from the established gaming world are flocking to web3. Whether they do it out of a fear of missing out or genuine belief in blockchain technologies, the trend appears irreversible at least for now, as investment keeps pouring into the industry.

Oasys, a Japan- and Singapore-based startup that’s building a blockchain for gaming developers, has just raised $20 million. The round was led by Republic Capital with participation from Jump Crypto, Crypto.com, Huobi, Kucoin, Gate.io, Bitbank, and Mirana Ventures.

Rather than a traditional equity round, the capital came in a private token sale, which “doesn’t dilute the equity of our project that we firmly believe in” and “allows us to reach a broader base of backers than a traditional equity fundraiser will,” Daiki Moriyama, director at Oasys, tells TechCrunch.

The founding team is deeply rooted in the Japanese gaming industry but picked Singapore as the firm’s other home because Japan “has regulatory issues regarding crypto assets,” the executive says. Singapore has emerged as a crypto hub in Asia in recent years.

Some of the biggest obstacles facing blockchain-based applications are slow transactions and high gas fees, the costs incurred when a transaction is added to a blockchain. Infrastructure developers like Solana, Avalanche and Polygon are trying to make blockchain services more scalable.

Oasys, merely five months old, shares the same goal. For most games to be “fun” or “good” in the blockchain, they need to be highly scalable with high transaction speed and low or zero gas fees for users, Moriyama suggests.

With a focus on blockchain games, Oasys has attracted a list of household names in the gaming world to be “validators” on its blockchain. The network uses the