Web3 startup to introduce ‘buy now, pay later’ service for gaming NFTs

Web3 startup Halliday is on a mission to make acquiring ownership of NFTs accessible to more people.

The startup, founded in November 2021 by Akshay Malhotra and Griffin Dunaif, recently raised US$ 6 million in a seed funding round led by Andreesen Horowitz (a16z). The funds will be used to transform how users pay for their gaming & metaverse NFTs.

Other participant investors in the funding round include Hashed, A.Capital, SV Angel, and several others.

Halliday – its name inspired by the Ready Player One protagonist James Halliday — has the vision to help gamers afford pricier in-game purchases and NFTs by allowing them to pay over time and still access them even without complete payment.

'We want to make game and metaverse NFTs a lot more accessible to players, and you should not see a very high price tag,' co-founder Malhotra said. 'We allow players to pay over time and access the NFT, playing while they're paying.'

Halliday's NFT payment solution would be first introduced with limited availability on the blockchain game 'League of Kingdoms' in a couple of weeks before fully launching later this year.

How Halliday works is simple: A user selects an NFT on one of Halliday's supported marketplaces, then Halliday pays for it. The user can use the NFT in-game, but ownership of the NFTs would still belong to Halliday. After the user completes the payment to Halliday (via a payment plan), the NFT ownership is transferred to the user.

A user that defaults on Halliday payments will lose access to the NFT and may also find it difficult to access Halliday's services in the future.

Halliday will show up as an extra payment option on its partner games and NFT marketplaces. Payment via Halliday can also be made with cryptocurrency or credit cards.  

'We see ourselves as building economic infrastructure to facilitate the emergence of this digital civilization," Dunaif said. "Any sophisticated and mature economy needs a service like this to facilitate growth and let people jump into worlds and gain items more quickly.'

The "pay later" service offered by platforms like Halliday is a recent trend in the NFT sector. Last month, a Defi lending platform, Teller, introduced 'Ape Now, Pay Later,' to allow users to buy Bored Ape and other Ethereum NFTs and pay off the entry fee over time.

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