LifeForce Games, a blockchain video game development studio, today announced the successful completion of its $5 million seed round. The round was led by Lemniscap with participation from CMT Digital, Sfermion, Hartmann Capital, Sterling VC, as well as Ready Player DAO and Neon DAO. Most of the $5M raised from the round will go toward […]

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Animal Concerts is a next-generation entertainment platform that has already hosted concerts with Busta Rhymes, Future, Alicia Keys, Meek Mill, Diplo, and Gunna in the metaverse. They successfully held a $6.75 million private round from a consortium of funds and token holders.

Animal Concerts is a next-generation metaverse entertainment platform found at the intersection of concerts, NFTs, VR, gaming, advertising, merchandising, distributed ledgers, and cryptocurrencies. The aim is to completely revolutionize the existing concert and entertainment industry through the introduction of Web3 technologies, replacing an obsolete model with an entirely new paradigm that provides numerous verticals for profitability. 

Some of the prominent backers within the private round included ZMT Capital, Maven Capital, Metrix Capital, Magnus Capital, Skybridge20, Arkn, Amesten Capital, Greenhorns Capital, Brotherhood VC, Interstellar Ventures, and Sheesha Finance. Additional supporters included Polygon and Klaytn through ecosystem grants, as well as Netvrk, Vera, and GlobalStar. 

Animal Concerts has a number of initiatives towards which the funds are being allocated. This will mainly include the pursuit of top-tier artists for metaverse events as well as collaborative NFT drops, marketing, ecosystem development, liquidity provisioning, and team expansion. Shortly after the fundraising, an in-person concert was held in LA on the 12th of February with Mill, Diplo, and Gunna. The project is finalizing two sets of NFT collections: one with an A-list artist and their own, along with securing a Tier 1 exchange to list the $ANML token in the coming months.

The project is looking to disrupt the existing live concert and online entertainment industry by securing record deals with artists and providing a new means of experiencing entertainment events. This will further open revenue generation models in the form of record deals, ticket sales, merchandising, advertising, and more. The project whitepaper notes the glaring inefficiencies within the existing concert industry and is complementing it with decentralized technologies to ensure a more interactive and equitable transaction for all parties.

Animal Concerts is launching its own in-house cryptocurrency specific to the live concert industry with some real utilities never before experienced. The project is bringing an entirely new ‘Watch-to-Earn' model where metaverse participants are rewarded for their time and attention. Alongside being able to use your $ANML to purchase merch, virtual meet and greets, and stake to get access to free concerts, the ecosystem invites purchasers to get involved knowing their tokens are getting circulated into best use case scenarios.

Alongside the successful private round, the $ANML token was available for purchase on five project launchpads between January 17–21, before selling $800k throughout the week. The launchpads included Vent Finance, Firestarter, Synapse Network, Polkabridge, and Starter. The price for the token was $0.0045. For each IDO the lock-up was 25% at the TGE with 75% vested over 6 months. These project launchpads assist in finding long-term holders, incubation and awareness, marketing, and KYC verification.

Next on the Animal Concerts roadmap is a Tier 1 CEX listing where the token, $ANML, will be listed and available for purchase. They also have secured AscendEX as another exchange that will list $ANML. Finally, an exciting NFT drop in collaboration with an A-list artist will be hitting the marketplace in the next quarter. 

About Animal Concerts

Animal Concerts is building the Next Generation of Live Events in the Metaverse. The platform aims to revolutionize the music industry for fans and artists worldwide: delivering unique, physical concerts with A-list artists, collaborating on NFT drops, live streaming in the Metaverse, and tokenizing the entire experience. 

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HONG KONG, Feb 9, 2022 - (ACN Newswire) - Recently, XanPay announced a partnership with SWAG, a leading online entertainment interactive brand, to launch new alternative payment methods. Online entertainment experienced exponential growth during the pandemic. According to a related report, the worldwide traffic of online entertainment has grown substantially during the COVID-19 period. The increasing number of people working from home and restrictive social distancing measures has made online entertainment avenues extremely popular.

SWAG gained the upper hand against its competitors during this period partnering with a payment gateway specialized in alternative payment methods, XanPay.

Challenges of Online Entertainment Platforms in High-Risk Industry

SWAG is one of Asia's largest online entertainment interactive brands. The Taiwan-based company started in 2017 with a team of 80 employees. They have come a long way to establish themselves as the leader in the region.

For those who are unfamiliar, there are major challenges and taboos that the alternative online entertainment space constantly faced for decades:

• Many financial institutions (FIs) consider merchants in this industry as 'high-risk'
• 'High-risk' merchants faced extreme scrutiny and long approval lead times
• Payment gateways that are accepting of these merchants usually charged exorbitant fees, sometimes nearly 20%
• Unnecessary and tedious paperwork and processes
• Perceived as risky business due to the high possibility of high chargeback

It wasn't any different for SWAG and they encountered many such obstacles over the years, but they continued to look for solutions that support the online entertainment content creator industry. Research shows that local payment methods or alternative payment methods (APMs) are 3x more popular than credit cards across APAC.

So, they began to look for local payment gateways which provided alternative payment methods (APMs) across Asia. However, issues like poor API integration documentation and having payment gateways that disappeared without response - made it difficult for them to break into new markets.

Reliable Payment Gateway in the APAC Region

When OnlyFans announced an official ban, the SWAG team onboarded many of the online entertainment content creators. They were determined to provide a reputable source of entertainment as well as income to their content creators.

After getting to know about XanPay, SWAG integrated and went live with new payment options within a week. Immediately, they observed payment adoption from across 8 new countries. Singapore, Malaysia and Hong Kong became their biggest markets in this region. Additionally, the number of payment issues reported by users had also drastically reduced.

Since then, XanPay accounts for up to 90% of their payment transactions in the new markets that they expanded to.

Key Highlights

• Generated revenue from 8 new Asian countries within a month of integration
• About 50% of the transactions are from XanPay vs non-XanPay
• Grew their revenue and transaction volume by 5% within 3 months of integration
• of payment issues reported by users drastically reduced
• Ability to focus on bigger marketing and expansion plans
• Acquired new users with XanPay processing up to 90% of the transaction volume in SEA

Quote section

"XanPay is our one-stop payment gateway in Asia. They solved our pain points. Not only are we able to reach new users and markets, but our alternative payments in the SEA region are also now managed by them, which is amazing." - Allan Lei, CTO of SWAG

Payments, Streamlined

XanPay has become their one-stop payment gateway solution using the full checkout page option. By getting the right payment gateway, the SWAG team gets to focus their efforts on bigger business plans.

SWAG now aimed to deepen its reach into Vietnam, Thailand and Indonesia.

About XanPay

XanPay is a unique payment gateway specialized in serving global customers locally. XanPay partners with organizations and small businesses to scale quickly and achieve outcomes through modern cross-border payment solutions. For XanPay, modern means widely adopted, seamless, convenient and secure. As a fast-growing payments company, XanPay built connections across 490 local banks in over 10 countries, enabling any businesses in the ecosystem to accept easy payments competitively. Shaping the next-generation payments landscape by bringing greater financial access.

For more information, visit
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/xanpay/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/XanPayOfficial
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOmtkZ6cwwamzmQ_iViuzeA
Website: https://xanpay.com/

Media Queries
Carrine Eng, Marketing & PR Manager
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE: XanPay

As a confluence of technologies like NFTs, blockchain gaming, virtual and augmented realities, and digital fashion, the metaverse brings physical and digital worlds together. Metaverse innovation, particularly by using NFTs…

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