Company that helps gamers pay bills in Smooth Love Potion raises $13 million

DeFi services firm XLD Finance has raised $13 million during a pre-Series A funding round led by Dragonfly Capital and Infinity Ventures Crypto, the company announced on Tuesday.

Advance AI, Circle, Digital Currency Group, IDG Capital, Insignia Venture Partners, Integra Partners, Morningstar Ventures, Openspace Ventures, Sfermion, Shima Capital, Transcend Fund, TrustToken, UOB Venture Management, Woo Network, Yield Guild Games, YOLO Ventures, Emfarsis and 20 other investors also participated in the round.

The company said the funds will be used to scale its product and engineering teams, as well as to expand its networks of licensed partner financial institutions, merchants and billers.

Co-founders Ian Estrada and Herbie Fu launched XLD Finance in June last year. The company released its first ecosystem project, xSpend, which allows users to pay utility bills and top up their mobile phone using gaming tokens and stablecoins, in January.

Estrada told The Block that the most popular token people are using on xSpend is Axie Infinity's Smooth Love Potion (SLP), which players can win through in-game battles. 

xSpend is currently available in the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, India and Bangladesh — but that doesn’t mean that utility companies there are accepting crypto payments just yet. Instead, the app acts as a “crypto-to-fiat off-ramp” and pays merchants in fiat through partners in the different countries.

“The way we do it is they basically initiate the transaction on chain and send us the [for example] SLP. But across the markets that we operate in we actually have a fiat liquidity pool that's based in that country. We use that to settle with the merchant network,” Estrada told The Block.

Beyond retail, XLD Finance said it is also working on products for protocols and exchanges, and this month will also launch OmniX, a streamlined system for guilds and projects to pay staff and contributors.