Animoca Brands’ subsidiary TinyTap raises US$8.5 million to disrupt education with Web3

Tel Aviv, Israel, April 25th, 2023, Chainwire

TinyTap, a subsidiary of Animoca Brands and the leading edtech platform for user-generated educational games, today announced that it has raised US$8.5 million from investors including Sequoia China, Liberty City Ventures, Kingsway Capital, Shima Capital, Polygon, GameFi Ventures, and others. The funding will be used to support TinyTap’s business expansion and accelerate development in the edtech space.

The investment will enable TinyTap to continue to expand its successful Web2 platform, which already serves over 9.2 million registered members, into an alternative Web3 education system that better values teachers by improving the earning opportunities available to them, and enables parents and communities to support and promote their preferred educational materials.

TinyTap launched its Web3 strategy in 2022 with two successful auctions of Publisher NFTs, which generated 243 ETH (approximately US$352,000 at times of auction). Publisher NFTs are a new concept introduced by TinyTap to better empower, reward, and incentivize educational content creators and publishers.

Each Publisher NFT represents co-publishing rights to one TinyTap Course, which is a curated bundle of educational games made on the TinyTap platform by one teacher in one specific subject. When these NFTs are sold, the proceeds are shared with the Course creators, and the NFT buyers assume the role of co-publishers. In return for promoting and marketing the associated Courses, the buyers share in the benefits generated from co-publishing efforts.

Since the TinyTap Publisher NFTs were auctioned in Q4 2022, the average income to NFT buyers resulting from their co-publishing efforts amounted to approximately 8.2% (or 19.7% annualized) of the purchase price of the Publisher NFTs*.

The Publisher NFT model is therefore able to simultaneously benefit the creators of educational content, the buyers of the Publisher NFTs, and TinyTap. This frees the creators to focus their efforts on generation of quality content, while TinyTap and the buyers of Publisher NFTs distribute and promote the content.

Misa Matsuzaki owns two Publisher NFTs and earned about $7,823 from November 2022 to March 2024 by co-publishing the associated courses. She commented: “TinyTap helps teachers to actualize great ideas into educational content that can be…