Argus Labs, a web3 gaming studio, has announced on Tuesday about its “seed round,” that was led by Haun Ventures which is a crypto investment firm. According to the tweet, the $10 Million seed round was led by Haun Ventures along with the participation of some other investors. Amid tough market conditions, such funding rounds for blockchain and web3-based are a good sign.
Thrilled to announce our $10M seed round led by @HaunVentures with participation from prominent funds, strategic investors, and angels, including @AlchemyPlatform @robotventures @eladgil @balajis, @cjliu49, @blader, and other to push the envelope of fully onchain games. pic.twitter.com/8DaZmYmzkU
— ARGUS ◢ ✦ ◣ (@ArgusLabs_) June 6, 2023
Alchemy Platform, Robot Ventures, Elad Gil, Balaji, Calvin, and Siqi Chen are the leading participants from “prominent funds, strategic investors, and angels,” as noted in the tweet. With the seed round, the web3 gaming studio is heading towards “fully on-chain games.”
The web3 gaming studio traces its roots back to 2020 to the birth of Dark Forest, a decentralized rts game. This was the “first fully on-chain MMORTS game which is built on Ethereum using zkSNARKs.”
As noted in Argus’s recent tweet, after the launch of Dark Forest, it brought the future of crypto games into focus.” Dark Forest is “a world where great games could coexist with player-driven content, tools, and platforms that interact and compose directly on top of the core game state and ruleset,” as noted in the tweet.
The Web3 Studio Brought ‘World Engine’
Adding about the fully on-chain game like Dark Forest, Argus also introduced World Engine (WE). It is a blockchain designed for on-chain games. As the web3 gaming studio added, the sharding design of Argus is inspired by “MMO game server architecture.” Due to its sharded design, WE also enables game developers that will distribute its game load across “high-performance game shards.”
WE’s ECS (Entity-Component-System)-based game shard, Cardinal, integrates seamlessly “with major game engines.” This will give the features and performance that one would expect from a traditional game server, as Argus Labs added. This eventually “blurring the line between a blockchain and a game server.”
The WE EVM base shard usually gives a central platform “for players and developers” so they build “user-generated content and platforms.” It can interoperate seamlessly with the Game Shards through Argus’s Shard Router system.
Berachain’s Polaris, a high-performance modular EVM framework, WE’s EVM shards can be customized through its stateful precompile and plugin system. Argus opened its “first cohort of private beta testers for a select few teams to give the World Engine stack a spin.”
The CEO of the web3 gaming studio, Scott Sunarto also shared his thoughts related to his company’s further plans. As he noted in his recent interview, he said his firm “aims to not only build the blockchain infrastructure to support emerging Web3 games but also to support developers in expanding their visions.”
As Sunarto said Argus Labs plans to use the funding to scale the team. This will build out the studio along with the tooling infrastructure.
Nancy J. Allen is a crypto enthusiast and believes that cryptocurrencies inspire people to be their own banks and step aside from traditional monetary exchange systems. She is also intrigued by blockchain technology and its functioning.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/06/07/argus-labs-gaming-studio-announces-10-million-seed-funding-round/