Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led a $25 million seed round to fund the launch of Co:Create, a new protocol that intends to support the growth of NFT projects and enable them to launch their own native tokens. VaynerFund, Packy McCormick’s Not Boring Capital, FTX’s head of ventures and gaming Amy Wu, RTFKT and fractional.art participated in the round.

Ever since Yuga Labs’ Bored Ape Yacht Club (BAYC) launched Ethereum utility token ApeCoin (APE), the larger Web3 community is seeing the potential of tying a token to the performance of NFTs (non-fungible tokens). ApeCoin is a governance token for the Ape DAO that launched within BAYC’s first year, and was recently required to participate in a virtual land sale.

Blockworks spoke to Tara Fung, the co-founder and chief executive officer at Co:Create, who said that the trend of native tokens “is here to stay.”

“There’s a lot of potential that NFTs hold that still needs to be realized. And it’s indicative of the fact that the space is quite nascent,” Fung said, adding that she hopes Co:Create can “serve as a core component of the tooling and infrastructure layer to support other creators’ visions.”

In addition to providing the tools and infrastructure for Web3 brands to issue native tokens, Co:Create aims to manage and engage communities through decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) while incentivizing the growth of dApp ecosystems around their collections.

According to Fung, Co:Create is about unlocking the potential of NFTs and going beyond drops and sales. Fung is bullish on the power of decentralized governance, citing ApeCoin as an example of a tool that is bringing the BAYC ecosystem to a wider audience through its metaverse and gaming strategies.

In a statement shared with Blockworks, Chris Dixon, general partner at a16z crypto, said the Co:Create protocol “puts creators on the right path to designing and implementing the most challenging components of successful NFT communities.” He added that the industry is “only beginning to appreciate what a motivated and engaged NFT community is capable of.”

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