Cartridge raises $7.5M in funding for onchain game development

Cartridge, an infrastructure provider for onchain games and autonomous worlds, announced today that it has raised $7.5M in its Series A funding round. Bitkraft Ventures led the round, with Fabric, Dune, StarkWare, Primitive and Ergodic participating. It also announced Dojo 1.0, its open-source developer toolset and framework for building provable games. To mark the occasion, Cartridge is supporting several onchain games releasing this summer built with Dojo, including Loot Survivor, Paved and Dope Wars.

Tarrence van As, Cartridge’s CEO, told GamesBeat in an interview that the company planned on using the funding to build out its team and grow its ecosystem. “We have Dojo, which is the framework for defining fully onchain games — games where the entire state and logic lives on the chain — we have part of the team maintaining that. We’re also continuing to develop two different products we’ve built around that ecosystem: The Cartridge Controller, which deals with player identity and reputation, and Slot, our execution layer.”

Nicolas Vereecke, Bitkraft investor, also spoke to GamesBeat about Cartridge’s new moves. “We strongly believe that using web3 as a computing platform will be, or has the potential, at least, to be, another major shift within the wider games industry. It became clear that the cartridge team was one of the front runners in actually building infrastructure that would allow studios and teams to create these fully on chain or on chain experiences.”

The future of onchain gaming

Vereecke added that Bitkraft backs founders that they see working in areas that are “directionally what the future looks like,” Cartridge included. “At Bitkraft, we do believe that blockchain adds value to games in many different ways, and gaming historically has been the proving ground of new technologies. We think that what Cartridge is doing — using the blockchain as a foundation to build games upon — is significant. In our view, there’s a very large chance that, 10 years from now, a significant amount of games will make use of blockchain.”

Van As also spoke of the benefits of building a game fully onchain. “You can reduce the amount of resources required by taking advantage of these shared components. You can also reduce the go-to market risk by building on an existing ecosystem in a way that wasn’t possible before. Previously, you could never really build a sustainable company on top of an existing company — for example, even in [user-generated content] we’ve seen be very successful, there’s very little actual capital formation on top of those ecosystems. Crypto blockchains with their native payment rails, can remove the platform risk and allow people to build those types of companies.”

Cartridge also announced it was launching new educational and funding initiatives for developers, including the Dojo Sensei Residency Program, an eight-week training program in New York City. As van As said, “It’s going to push the needle on what’s possible in this new kind of modality. It’s also a huge testament to the ecosystem we’re building that 30 people, and a lot of them people with existing jobs, are coming to New York to spend two months with us building exciting things together.”