The Museum of Crypto Art (MOCA) Secures a $1.5M Investment from NFT and DeFi Founders

The Museum of Crypto Art (MOCA), a Metaverse-native museum for digital art and innovative ideas, has secured a $1.5 million investment. The project announced this news on June 24, noting that the funding round was spearheaded by multiple leading founders in the NFT and DeFi space. Reportedly, the funding round was spearheaded by the founder of Yield Guild Games (YGG), Gabby Dizon, and Coingecko’s Ong Chong Eu.

According to the announcement, other investors behind the $1.5 million investment were Suji Yan, the founder of Mask.io, a platform that lets social media users encrypt their chats and posts, Daniel Maegaardaka, also known as Danny NFT, Andrew Steinwold, Eric Clark Su, the Metapurse fund, Bitscale Capital, and Mantra XR. Sandeep Nailwal and Jaynti Kanani, the co-founders of blockchain scalability platform Polygon, also took part in this funding round.

Explaining why he had invested in MOCA, Suji Yan said,

“MOCA is an institution in cryptoart and I'm happy to invest and participate in its future direction. I'm looking forward to collaborating with MOCA in bringing the best crypto artists to the rest of the world.”

Pushing for the growth of the NFT space

Before this MOCA announced the launch of the MOCA token on May 26 this year. The coin runs on Polygon and it serves as a governance and utility token. As such, MOCA holders can vote on art pieces added to the museum’s Genesis Collection, which has 160 portraits, and future exhibits. Apart from this, the token facilitates the curation of museum assets by the community.

With the raised $1.5 million, MOCA is looking to create a runway for the museum to further foster and showcase cryptoart. Per Colborn Bell, the co-founder of MOCA, the museum has already highlighted seven solo artist shows through an incubator program. With these funds, he looks to make MOCA a place for artists that look to help define NFT standards and institute policies.

Bell believes that the NFT space is an art movement that adds a visual language to the principles of the crypto market. According to him, cryptoart is making the crypto space, which is quite complex to understand, more tangible and visible.