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Author: 0xAkina

Gm everyone!

If you’re like me and spend most of your time on Twitter, you probably saw the recent announcement of recipients for Round 3 of Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding (RPGF).

Through this system, members of Optimism’s Citizen House voted to distribute 30M OP tokens (~$81M) to projects based on their impact on the Optimism Collective.

501 projects got an allocation, including five in the onchain gaming space (like WASD!).

A while back, I wrote a piece on the state of the onchain gaming venture markets.

In light of the RPGF announcement, I thought it would be good to re-visit this topic by diving into the actual projects that have received funding, and some of the common threads among them.

Let’s get into it!

Venture Capital

To start, let’s look at the projects that have gone down the more “traditional” route and raised venture capital.

Proof Of Play

Proof Of Play is the studio behind Pirate Nation, a pirate-themed RPG on Arbtirum Nova where you can quest, craft NFT items, battle in PVE combat, and accumulate Pirate Gold (PGLD).

While the game is currently just PVE, it’s set to launch a PVP combat mode in the coming months.

The team is also developing its own onchain gaming engine (though there are few details about it).

In September 2023, Proof Of Play announced a $33M seed round led by a16z Crypto and Greenoaks, with participation from various high-profile angels like Balaji Srinivasan and Naval Ravikant.

This is the largest raise for an onchain gaming/autonomous worlds-focused project to date!

Argus Labs

Argus Labs is building onchain games and infrastructure.

Their flagship product is World Engine, which through its sharded rollup SDK, enables developers to create horizontally scalable, EVM-compatible L2s optimized for hosting high-throughput onchain games.

Argus is also building several 1st-party titles using World Engine.

Their first was Dark Frontier, an independent reboot of the classic onchain MMORTS Dark Forest that launched in December 2023.

Based on their website, the team appears to be working on other games in stealth.

On the fundraising side, Argus announced they had raised a $10 million seed round led by Haun Ventures in June 2023.

The round included participation from funds like Robot Ventures and numerous angel investors.

Cartridge

Like Argus, Cartridge is building both infra and onchain games.

Cartridge has contributed to the ecosystem in a variety of ways.

Not only does their website serve as a Stream-like discovery channel for Starknet games, but the team has also developed:

• Controller

A system for creating player accounts and profiles on Starknet.

• Slot

A rollup-as-a-service platform for building games with Dojo that the team is using to build Realms World and PAPERCHAIN (more on that below).

• Roll Your Own

A drug-dealing game built in conjunction with Dope Wars.

• Dojo

The team contributes to Dojo, the aforementioned framework for building onchain games using Cairo and the Cairo VM.

• Realms World and PAPERCHAIN

Cartridge is partnering with Realms to launch “Realms World” and Dope Wars to launch “PAPERCHAIN,” L3s built using Slot that will settle to Starknet and Optimism, respectively.

Cartridge raised a $5M seed round in 2023, co-led by Dune and Chapter One, with participation from other investors, including Geometry, Fabric, Starkware, and Volt.

Curio

Curio is another team building both onchain games and infrastructure.

Their primary offering is Keystone, a framework for building performant EVM-compatible L2s tailored for hosting onchain games.

The logic for games built with Keystone is written in Go, enabling developers to leverage the language’s existing resources and tooling.

Like Argus and Cartridge, Curio is also building their own, 1st party title using their tech (Though details on it remain scant).

Curio raised a $2.9M seed round in 2023, led by Bain Capital Crypto and including participation from other funds like Robot Ventures.

Citadel

Citadel is an in-development, 3D space MMO where players must navigate through an open world.

Although the game is not yet live, Citadel is set to incorporate numerous exciting features, including a unique decentralized governance system, zk-proofs for hidden information, and a robust in-game economy.

In November 2023, Citadel announced a $3.3M seed round led by 1kx with participation from Shima Capital, Hashed, Matchbox DAO, and others.

RetroPGF

A second major source of funding in the onchain gaming ecosystem has been Optimism’s Retroactive Public Goods Funding.

As previously mentioned, in this system, Optimism’s Citizen’s House (comprised of community members) votes to allocate OP tokens to projects based on their impact on the ecosystem.

Three rounds have been held to date, distributing a total of 21M OP.

Let’s take a look at the onchain gaming projects that have received RPGF.

Lattice

Lattice is “an engineering and product-focused company pushing the boundaries of Ethereum applications and infrastructure.”

Lattice has made numerous contributions to the ecosystem as they’ve built:

• MUD

MUD is a framework for building EVM applications that’s been used to create onchain games like Sky Strife, Primodium, Words3, and others.

• Redstone

Redstone is an OP-Stack-based, optimistic rollup optimized for hosting onchain games and autonomous worlds.

Currently live on testnet, Redstone uses Plasma for data availability to further reduce gas costs.

• Sky Strife

Sky Strife is a turn-based RTS built in MUD. In the game, players compete in 2-4 player matches with the aim of capturing their opponent's bases while defending their own.

Lattice received 195,280.29 OP in Round 3 of RPGF and 183,348.21 OP in Round 2 (378,628.5 total).

Small Brain Games

Small Brain Games (led by Small Brain Dev) has built numerous onchain games.

Most of their games are relatively easy to pick up (though hard to master) and employ novel, unique mechanics.

These include:

• Words3: A PVP world-building game.

• Network States: A PVP strategy game with lore generated by GPT-4.

• Apes Gambit: A battle royale chess game.

• Dark Seas: A naval-themed action strategy game.

• DrawTech: A PVP drawing game.

Small Brain Games received 114, 285.18, and 28,260.70 OP (142,545.88 total) in RPGF Rounds 2 and 3, respectively.

Ronan Sandford

Ronan Sandford is a developer building “persistent and permissionless” autonomous worlds.

An onchain gaming OG, Ronan is responsible for numerous works throughout the ecosystem, as he founded the onchain gaming studio Etherplay (the team behind Strategems and Conquest).

Ronan also wrote "Ethereum, The Concept of Gas and its Dangers", an often-referenced article on how gas works in the EVM, and was the co-author of ERC-1155 and ERC-2271.

Ronan received 99,379.28 OP in the most recent round of RPGF.

AW House

AW House is a hacker house, grant program, hackathon, and R&D lab rolled into one.

Founded by Komorebi, AW House has done a great job of supporting onchain gaming builders in these different ways.

Their next Hacker House is set to take run from February 28 - March 4 during ETH Denver.

This follows three in 2023, which were held during ETHGlobal Tokyo, ETH CC in Paris, and in Istanbul at Devconnect.

I’d highly recommend joining them if you’re a current or aspiring onchain gaming builder.

In terms of RPGF, the project received 76,445.3 OP in Round 3.

WASD

WASD also received a grant of 74,534.6 OP in Round 3 of RPGF.

You probably know what we do if you’re reading this, so I want to use this time to thank you all for your support!

WASD is possible because of you all, and we’re excited to use these funds to continue to cover the onchain gaming ecosystem, host community events, grow our guild, and bring new people into the space!

Grants

Aside from RPGF, many individual grants have been distributed to onchain gaming projects over the past year.

This includes:

• Paima Studios, the team building the Paima Engine and games like Tarochi, who received a $1.4M grant from the Cardano Foundation.

• Land, Labor, Capital (LLC), who is developing an onchain business tycoon game and earned a $25,000 grant from Arbitrum.

• 0xobelisk, which is building an onchain gaming engine using Move and received a grant from the Sui Foundation.

• Dojo, Guildly, Banners, Ordengg, Tetration Lab, Miaocraft, NetherScape, Moving Castles, 0xHank, The Genesis Project, and The Rift who all received grants from Mask Network in 2023.

• An additional 20 projects that took home 200,000 LORDS in grants from Bibliotheca DAO’s Frontius House.

Trends and Takeaways

Whether from venture capital, RetroPGF, or traditional grants, many different onchain gaming projects have received funding in one way or another.

Based on what I mentioned, at least $57.7M in funding has been allocated to the space through these different means.

Venture capital has been the largest funding source, with projects raising $54.2M from VCs compared to ~$2.1M from RetroPGF and $1.5M from individual grants.

Interestingly, the makeup of the recipient seems to change based on the funding source.

RPGF and individual grants distributed capital to many types of projects, including games, individual developers, infrastructure, and more.

Although it’s a very small sample size, with the exception of Citadel, every VC-funded project is building infrastructure in addition to individual games.

This lends credence to the notion raised in my previous piece that investors wanting to bet on “pick and shovel” infrastructure more so than just individual games.

Nonetheless, it’s great to see onchain gaming projects beginning to receive recognition for their hard work and the resources they need to build.

However, this all goes to show you how young the ecosystem is.

The $57.7M in total funding is just a mere 0.3% of the $19B raised by Web3 gaming projects since 2018.

Will onchain games ever reach that total?

Who knows.

But here at WASD we expect that ratio in the long-run to be up only.

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Fire Eyes is a leading organization for onchain governance.

They are active players and contributors to onchain games, and care deeply about furthering the development of the Ethereum and DAO ecosystems.

Fire Eyes is a great outlet for any team looking for in-depth feedback on community sentiment and token design.

If you’re interested in getting in touch with 🔥_🔥 - DM them on X!

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