Mark Cuban, Animoca Back NFT Data Platform CryptoSlam in $9M Round

CryptoSlam, a data and analytics platform focused on the burgeoning NFT industry, announced today that it has raised a $9 million seed round led by Animoca Brands, with major backers like Mark Cuban, Sound Ventures, and Polygon participating as well.

Cuban was previously announced as a pre-seed investor in CryptoSlam in April 2021. Ryan Wasinger, CryptoSlam’s chief revenue officer, confirmed to Decrypt that Cuban made an additional investment as part of this seed round. Sound Ventures—the firm co-founded by actor Ashton Kutcher and music industry executive Guy Oseary—is another pre-seed investor that likewise also joined this seed round.

Animoca Brands is a prominent crypto industry investor that has backed more than 100 firms, with a focus on an open, interoperable metaverse. The company is also the publisher of The Sandbox, an upcoming Ethereum-based metaverse video game.

The oversubscribed seed round also included participation from Binance Smart Chain, OKEx Blockchain Ventures, Forte, and others, as well as founders including LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, Zynga’s Mark Pincus, and FanDuel’s Nigel Eccles.

“I’m excited about what CryptoSlam has accomplished to be the de facto source of information and pricing on all things NFT,” said Cuban, in a release.

An NFT acts like a deed of ownership to a unique digital item, including images, video files, video game items, and more. The industry expanded dramatically over the course of 2021, generating more than $22 billion worth of trading volume according to a mid-December estimate by analytics resource, DappRadar.

The NFT market has been hot again in recent weeks, as leading marketplace OpenSea recorded its second-best month of Ethereum trading volume in December with $3.25 billion. That’s a nearly 37% increase over November’s tally. OpenSea has already passed the $1 billion mark in January in less than five days, per data from Dune Analytics.

CryptoSlam tracks sales data for hundreds of notable NFT projects and collections across various blockchain protocols, including Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, Flow, and Binance Smart Chain. It also tracks the sale of sports industry fan tokens, such as those launched by soccer teams Paris Saint-Germain and FC Barcelona through the Socios platform.

The firm, which currently has more than 20 employees, plans to further expand its team, support additional blockchain protocols, and launch an enterprise data API that other developers can use to build their own NFT tracking tools.