Sydney NFT company Immutable has raised $82 million in a Series B funding round, taking its total funding to $105 million.

The capital raising was co-led by distributed esports venture capital firm BITKRAFT Ventures and King River Capital, a Sydney and California-based venture capital firm for software businesses.

Also taking part in the funding round were Australian and New Zealand venture capital fund AirTree Ventures; Prosus Ventures; Galaxy Interactive; Fabric Ventures, Sam Bankman Fried’s FTX exchange; Reinventure; Apex Capital; and Gary Vaynerchuk’s VaynerFund.

The funding will be used to expand Immutable’s global engineering and sales teams and strengthen partnerships with gaming companies, as well as scale the growth of its two in-house NFT games, Gods Unchained and Guild of Guardians.

Co-founded by brothers Robbie and James Ferguson in 2018, the company currently has 95 employees on Linkedin.

Immutable in April launched Immutable X, a layer 2 Ethereum scaling solution for NFTs built in partnership with StarkWare.

It’s what’s known as a ZK-rollup, or “zero knowledge proof” rollup, in contrast to the other notable Ethereum scaling solution technology known as Optimistic rollups.

In simple terms, all these “layer 2” solutions bundle numerous transactions together into a single one that’s published on the Ethereum mainnet, avoiding the congestion and high fees there.

“NFT trading is a terrible mainstream user experience right now,” said Robbie Ferguson. “It’s expensive, illiquid, and the only existing scaling solutions compromise on the most important thing — the security and user-base of Ethereum.

“We want businesses to create their game, marketplace or NFT application within hours via APIs, with a mainstream user experience. No blockchain programming required.”

Immutable says the ImmutableX platform can handle 9,000 transactions per second, with instant finality and zero gas fees. The platform is also carbon-neutral, with Immutable covering the cost of carbon credits until at least 2025.

Immutable held a US$13 million token sale for Immutable X on Coinlist last week, but “due to regulatory uncertainty,” Australians were barred from participating, along with those in the US, Canada, Hong Kong and mainland China.

Jens Hilgers, founding partner at Bitkraft Ventures, said the firm has “been encouraged by the strong momentum around the Ethereum ecosystem and are  excited by the prospects of this next-generation scalability infrastructure broadening accessibility for a new wave of blockchain game developers”.

“The future of asset trading is digital  and in-game items and in-game digital assets will broadly move onto the blockchain. To support and accelerate this shift the industry is in need of a scalable, fast, efficient and trusted  blockchain layer.

“With Immutable we have found the best team and product in the market to  make this industry shift a reality.”