Football Star Lionel Messi Backs Web3 Soccer Game Startup Matchday

Twitter icon  •  Published 1 год назад  •  Hassan Maishera

Football legend Lionel Messi has backed web3 soccer game startup Matchday in a $21 million seed funding round.

TLDR;

  • Matchday, a soccer-centric Web3 gaming startup, raised $21 million in seed funding.
  • Football star Lionel Messi is one of the investors in the company’s funding round.
  • Matchday will use the funds to develop a suite of games.

Messi Invests In Web3 Soccer Game Startup Matchday

Matchday, a soccer-centric Web3 gaming startup, announced on Thursday, March 9th, that it had raised $21 million in its seed funding. The company revealed that the funds would be used to develop a suite of games.

The company added that legendary soccer player Lionel Messi’s venture capital firm is one of the investors. Messi’s Play Time firm is one of the investors and is joined by other VC firms, including  Greylock, HackVC, Capricorn Investment Group, and Horizons Ventures.

Matchday further revealed that Spanish soccer star Alexia Putellas serves as Matchday’s founding global ambassador.

This isn’t the first time Lionel Messi is getting involved with a Web3 project. The football legend plays for Paris Saint-German and recently led Argentina’s national team to the 2022 FIFA World Cup win.

Lionel Messi is the brand ambassador for the prominent NFT fantasy soccer game Sorare and fan token platform Socio. The football star also invested in Sorare and signed a $20 million deal with Socio. The Barcelona legend also released his official NFT collection via the Ethernity Chain platform.

While commenting on this latest development, Matchday co-founder and CEO Derrick Ko said;

“We are building for an untapped audience in the football community. Our games will be accessible for all players, and centered around true ownership of digital items that will be a point of pride for all players,” De Halleux said in a statement.”

Matchday has an official license from FIFA, the governing body behind the World Cup, as well as the FIFPRO players association. 

Ko explained that the company’s games would be optimized for casual users. The company previously released a limited-time mini-game during the 2022 FIFA World Cup and issued around two million NFT player cards to roughly 600,000 users.

FIFA itself is not left out, as it launched an NFT platform on Algorand. Numerous football teams have also released Socios fan tokens that sometimes rise or drop in price based on their on-the-pitch performance.

Author

Hassan Maishera

Hassan is a Nigeria-based financial content creator that has invested in many different blockchain projects, including Bitcoin, Ether, Stellar Lumens, Cardano, VeChain and Solana. He currently works as a financial markets and cryptocurrency writer and has contributed to a large number of the leading FX, stock and cryptocurrency blogs in the world.