Immortal Game, a startup building a Web3 chess platform, recently raising $12 million in a Series A round led by TCG.  Due to both the pandemic and the popular Netflix show 'The Queen's Gambit,' online chess has seen a surge in popularity in the past few years.  Immortal Game is working to turn chess into a Web3 game with NFTs, play-to-earn rewards, quests, a marketplace, and more.  Thomas Zaepffel, co-founder and CEO of Immortal Game, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.


Web3 Chess Platform Immortal Game Raises $12 Million

okay. A start up building a Web three chess platform, a mortal game recently raising $12 million in a series a round led by TCG crypto due to both the pandemic and the popular netflix show the Queen's Gambit Online chess has seen a surge in popularity over the past few years and Mortal game is work chess into a web three game with N. F. T. S. Play to earn rewards, quests, a marketplace and much more joining me now to most Apple co founder and ceo of immortal Game. Thank you so much for joining us. Tell us about your startup immortal game and what you're offering to the world of chess. Thank you very much for for hosting me. It's a pleasure. So chess is played by 800 million people, so it's more than one out of 10 worldwide. Um it's already online massively. A lot of platforms have done a great job on that. We can witness more than 20 million games played per day online. But we felt there was a huge opportunity to bring Web stream into chess because it enables us to really involve um um communities into the game and really to give them back a lot of the values that create by being players of chess. So that's really what we are building and uh we are building the next generation of online platform and we to bring new experiences to the game. Um thanks to a lot of grandmasters helping us as ambassadors. So more than 50, we are also very happy to have the producer of the Queen's Gambit Scott Frank as an advisor with helping us to to to bring a new content uh into, into this ecosystem. Yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned scott frank because that is definitely a buzz worthy addition to your advisory board. I'm wondering in what way is the company working with him? What are you gaining from this partnership together? So as you mentioned in your introduction, um I think Queen's Gambit was a huge catalyst for for Jessica's system and the growth. Uh it was we we've been witnessing and cut obviously was was the creator of Queen's Gambit. So uh is helping us um to really see how we can continue to bring new content to chest and make it even more popular than it is right now. So in the medium term, I think you also mentioned this, that you now have 50 Grand Masters as advisors as well as other big names from the chess world. What is some of the feedback that you've gotten so far taking this very traditional game and kind of launching it into the future. So it's um that's our first goal was to work together with those grandmasters because it really helped us to as you say, mix it with a lot of novelty innovation with Web three, but we didn't want to corrupt the game. So it was really important for us to get the feedback from them to really be able to to change, to bring some new ideas to chess without breaking their games. It's been there for 2000 years. Obviously the reason for that is because it's a wonderful game that we didn't want to break. So, um, the help was huge and still very important for us because they are advising us and really how to smoothly bring new experiences to this game. Yeah. And recently we have to bring this up. The talk of the chess world has been a massive cheating scandal. So I wonder if you can weigh in on how you think some of this technology, I think primarily of things like Blockchain and crypto how that could potentially be implemented here to ensure the credibility and the fairness of the game very, very interesting point. You've, you've been witnessing that the, what we call the chest scandal right now between magnus carlsen and, and cinnamon. Obviously it's very complicated matter because it's very difficult to detect cheating in chess and right now since computers are at their top, the only way to detect cheating from the top players is by um, community assessment and I think in medium term that's something Blockchain will not solve but will bring some solutions to try to solve it. And that's something we're working on because with the community, we are involving into the project, we can obviously um find ways to um, to, to leverage the knowledge so that they can detect and decide vote about some people whether they are cheating or not. And that's really the only last way, um, to really detect the cheater right now, like from top players, because the computers are too good in this, in this new era, wow, it's really very interesting. That's thomas that fell ceo of immortal game. Thank you so much for joining us here on Cheddar News.