Nano Labs Raises "Tens of Millions of Dollars" In A Funding Round Led by Yongwan Capital, To Build Infrastructure For the Metaverse Ecosystem
Nano Labs LTD, a company keen to provide infrastructure solutions for the metaverse, has raised tens of millions of dollars.
Yongwan Capital Leads Funding
In a press release on September 15, it's reported Yongwan Capital spearheaded the funding round with participation from Hashkey and other investors. Funds would go towards deriving new products specifically for the metaverse ecosystem.
Presently, Nano Labs LTD is developing and expanding its product offerings. Notably, the firm provides high bandwidth and performance dedicated chips and other critical solutions for high throughput computing, distributed computing and storage, and vision computing of Autostereoscopy. All these are necessary for providing infrastructural support, propping the expanding metaverse ecosystem.
Mass Producing Cuckoo 1.0 Chips
In 2019, Nano Labs LTD developed a storage computing architecture integrated with a data Flow Process Unit (FPU). Unlike CPUs, FPUs offer a faster way of calculating floating non-integer numbers.
Last year, they also mass-produced the Cuckoo 1.0 chips which use FPU-2D technology with a power consumption of 100W. Each Cuckoo 1.0 chip has over 5 billion transistors on TSMC's 22nm enabling it to outperform traditional GPUs.
The Rise of Metaverses and NFTs
Metaverses are a new frontier for crypto and NFT-focused firms. The explosion of NFTs has seen more resources poured into the largely untapped metaverse world, where analysts say it would command billions in the years to come.
Like in the physical world, all assets within the metaverse—land, buildings, and more—can be bought and sold using cryptocurrencies. Underpinning any popular metaverse is an NFT complying with Ethereum or any other supporting ecosystem.
In Ethereum, many applicable standards are guiding the minting of NFTs. However, it is the ERC-731 standard that's common. Overall, all NFTs are unique, limited-edition, and exist in the digital realm, allowing easy transferability.
With the disruption of the Coronavirus, more people are taking to gaming and exploring upcoming blockchain-based metaverses incorporating NFTs and using cryptocurrencies as a medium of exchange.
Tether Co-founder Says NFTs will be Integral in Metaverses
In an interview with Bloomberg News, William Quigley, the co-founder of Tether (USDT), said metaverses have the potential to be an economic force, possibly disrupting people's lives.
He notes the ability of metaverses to create "a digital overlay" over people's reality and how it can change business models, significantly impacting interactions.
In William's assessment, the revenue model for metaverses will be NFTs, commanding hundreds of billions in revenue, surpassing those generated by traditional video gaming.
"I'm betting that the revenue model for the metaverse is going to be NFTs. In video gaming, the revenue model now is virtual items, and that's a $175 billion business annually. I think the metaverse should be orders of magnitude more than that because it's everything, it's not just gaming."
New Technology to Power Metaverses
Nano Labs LTD plans to anchor the next wave of metaverses and NFTs.
Besides rolling out Cuckoo 1.0 chips, the company won the "Annual IC Unicorn Award" during the 2021 China Semiconductor Investment Alliance Annual Conference and China IC Billboard Awards Ceremony in Beijing.
This was in recognition of them being the first company to use the Nano FPU architecture to have a competitive edge while remaining innovative. The "2021 China IC Billboard" list marks leaders in the industry. Members are picked by 129 member organizations of the China Semiconductor Investment Alliance and over 400 semiconductor CEOs.
