Web3 Gaming Studio Argus Raises $10M Seed Round Led by Haun Ventures
In Brief
Argus is a web3 game developer and publisher that traces its origins to Dark Forest, an on-chain MMORTS game built on Ethereum using zkSNARKs launched in 2020.
Alchemy, Dispersion Capital, Balaji Srinivasan and others participated in the seed round.
Argus created World Engine, a layer-2 blockchain designed for on-chain games.
Web3 game developer and publisher Argus has raised $10 million in a seed round led by Haun Ventures, with participation from Alchemy, Dispersion Capital, Anagram, and Robot Ventures. Angel investors who joined the round include Balaji Srinivasan, Elad Gil, and others.
The team behind Argus traces its origins to Dark Forest, an on-chain MMORTS game built on Ethereum using zkSNARKs launched in 2020. Argus founder & CEO Scott Sunarto and his friends co-created the game. Through building Dark Forest, they found that the inherent limitations of current blockchain architecture deterred many developers from building web3 games. This led Argus to the creation of World Engine, a blockchain designed for on-chain games.
“World Engine provides the foundation for game developers to build and customize their own open and interoperable game worlds. Through World Engine’s novel layer 2 sharding architecture, each game can now have its own horizontally scalable blockchain owned by the community and grows with it,”
Scott Sunarto, founder & CEO of Argus, wrote in a blog post.
Sunarto explained that the inability of blockchain smart contracts to self-execute at regular intervals poses a challenge in implementing an essential “game loop” system for game servers. This limitation introduces additional complexities for game developers and hinders their creativity.
Consequently, many game developers opt to have only in-game items stored on the blockchain as NFTs, while fully on-chain game developers face constraints within a limited design space, restricting them to relatively simple strategy-based or turn-based games.
Argus states that World Engine’s effectively addresses this issue through its sharding design influenced by the server architecture of computationally demanding massively multiplayer online (MMO) games. By adopting this approach, game developers can distribute their game load across multiple shards, while the World Engine chain can dynamically adjust its throughput based on demand.
The company claims that its first game shard implementation, Cardinal, can handle the workload of a performance-intensive game.
The game developer says that World Engine’s sharding approach also allows the decoupling of game execution (game shard) from smart contract execution (EVM shard). As a result, this creates a vast design space where developers can construct an optimized state machine tailored specifically for the efficient handling of game-related computations.
Currently, Argus is accepting a few select teams to build on World Engine as part of the blockchain’s private beta. Those interested can now apply and selected teams will receive support from the World Engine core team for both technical and non-technical matters, including game design, GTM, and more.
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About The Author
Originating from Ukraine and now residing in San Francisco, US, Volodymyr Karyshev is a prominent author with a deep expertise in blockchain and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) themes. With attendance at hundreds of conferences and events under his belt, Karyshev is celebrated for his exceptional reports, consistently capturing the nuances and advancements in the decentralized sector.
More articles
Originating from Ukraine and now residing in San Francisco, US, Volodymyr Karyshev is a prominent author with a deep expertise in blockchain and Zero-Knowledge (ZK) themes. With attendance at hundreds of conferences and events under his belt, Karyshev is celebrated for his exceptional reports, consistently capturing the nuances and advancements in the decentralized sector.
