Twitch Co-Founder Justin Kan To Launch Gaming NFT Marketplace Fractal

Justin Kan, the “Justin” of Justin.tv and the co-founder of Twitch, has co-founded Fractal, an upcoming marketplace for selling “durable in-game assets” as NFTs.

What exactly does that mean? In an intro post on Medium, Kan explains that the idea of Fractal was inspired by his experiences playing massively multiplayer online roleplaying games (MMORPGs) in the ’90s. In those games (and many, many modern games), players could buy plots of land to build their own virtual and often highly customized homes, then use those homes to store the items they collected—everything from gold to rare weapons to digital pets.

“A real economy started up, and some players began farming and selling in-game currency online,” Kan explains. “To anyone not playing the game, this sounded ridiculous: how could something inside a video game be worth real dollars? The idea that digital goods could have monetary value wasn’t yet established.”

But it is established now, Kan says, pointing to people being willing to pay real-world money for things like Fortnite skins and Roblox items. (Plus, you know, computer-randomized drawings of apes.)

Fractal is intended to be the gaming-focused equivalent of OpenSea

: a place where people and companies can mint and sell in-game assets as NFTs on the Solana blockchain.

“Our mission is to create an open platform for the free exchange of digital goods,” Kan says. “Players will be able to discover, buy and sell gaming NFTs on Fractal, through both a primary market (initial drops by gaming companies) and a secondary market (p2p trading).”

Per TechCrunch, Fractal is also building in a Kickstarter-esque side where users will be able to buy NFTs in presale to fund creation of the games the NFTs are for. (For example, you might back a game for $35, and your reward for that $35 is an NFT that unlocks a backer-exclusive location within the game, if it ends up finished and launched.)

On top of that, the company intends to build out “infrastructure for emergent use cases of NFTs as well, such as the lending / scholarship model in some play-to-earn games,” Kan tweeted.

Fractal is still in development, but plans to launch “soon,” he added.