As children, some of the best memories we have are of exchanging cards with friends and boasting about being the proud owner of a highly sought-after card. Who can forget trading Pokemon cards in the playground! For fans of card trading, this experience has now entered the digital realm, with players being able to own and trade cards online.
With a waitlist of people eager to play and fans such as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Skyweaver is set to reignite our childhood memories.
Skyweaver is a new game from Horizon Blockchain Games that pays homage to traditional playground card-trading games. How? Skyweaver is based on the Ethereum blockchain, which means that when players trade, sell and collect virtual cards, they are the sole owner of a card and are able to trade it on to other players securely via the blockchain network. It is described as a ‘worldwide competitive trading card game’ that allows players to build unique card decks, earn rare cards, summon creatures in the digital universe and compete with others. Players can choose cards such as strength, heart, intellect, agility, and wisdom. With a waitlist of people eager to play and fans such as Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, Skyweaver is set to reignite our childhood memories.
Skyweaver is just one proof-of-concept for Horizon Blockchain Games’ new gaming paradigm Sequence: a seamless user and developer experience for Ethereum, NFTs, Web3, DeFi and Dapps. The Toronto-based games company has just announced it has raised $4.5 million in seed round funding from Bitkraft Ventures, CMT Digital, The Xchange Company, Khaled Verjee, and Zyshan Kaba.
Sequence’s funding round is just a small bomb in the meteoric explosion we are witnessing in the digital gaming world today, with industry revenues growing from $115 billion in 2018 with the expectation to surpass $138 billion by the end of 2021, according to Statista. This growth occurs alongside a seismic shift towards Web 3.0 and, as a result, we are seeing more and more games on the market that are powered by blockchain technology.
Just a few days prior to Horizon Blockchain Games announcing its funding, NFT-based game Splinterlands announced that it raised $3.6M via a private token sale. Splinterland is a virtual card trading game, where players compete in a series of quickfire battles for a limited reward pool of in-game crypto, known as Dark Energy Crystals (DEC), and NFTs. According to the Splinterlands website ‘Each battle has a different combination of combat rules, total Mana cap, and playable Splinters! Strategy is critical in creating the best team for the given situation.’
In the same week, Yield Games – a blockchain-powered gaming startup based in the Philippines – announced that it had raised $12.5m via a public crypto token sale in under 1 minute. Yield Games brands itself as a ‘play to earn’ gaming guild, where players can earn currency in virtual block-chain-based economies.
In this era of innovation, we are witnessing an exploding gaming industry, married with a burgeoning blockchain industry, where old-school card trading can continue to live on. Skyweaver is just one example of a sea of blockchain-based games that have swept into the realm of mainstream gaming, attracting the attention of global leaders in the tech world. Given the great partnership between gaming and blockchain, we can see investments in crypto-gaming becoming more prevalent.
