The infrastructure company building the engine, wallet, and rails for fully onchain games - so players actually own the worlds they play in.
“Play for something.” - the company's line for real ownership over provably-fair game economies.
Cartridge is not trying to make a hit game. It is trying to make everyone else's onchain games possible. Founded in 2022 in Brooklyn by Tarrence van As and Calvin Dunwoody, the company - roughly fourteen people spread between New York and Austin - builds the engine, wallet, and execution layer that game studios use to put entire game worlds onchain, not just the tradable items.
At the center is Dojo, an open-source protocol and toolchain for building provable, fully onchain games and autonomous worlds on Starknet. Around it sit the Cartridge Controller, a game-native smart contract wallet, and Slot, an execution layer built specifically for games. Together they form a stack that lets a studio ship an onchain game without asking players to think about the blockchain at all.
The bet is straightforward, even if the technology is not: if game logic lives onchain, the rules become verifiable, the economy becomes genuinely player-owned, and the world can outlive any single studio. Web3 gaming's early wave mostly failed on user experience and hollow tokenomics. Cartridge's answer is to make the chain disappear behind familiar logins and to open-source the parts that matter, so builders can inspect and extend them.
“This Series A funding round marks a significant milestone for Cartridge as we continue to accelerate the development of onchain games and experiences.”
Three products that map to the three hard problems of onchain gaming: logic, identity, and execution.
Open-source engine and toolchain for building provable, fully onchain games and autonomous worlds. Dojo 1.0 provides a framework for complex game logic and state - the game itself runs as verifiable code.
A self-custodial, game-native smart contract wallet. Passkeys and social login instead of seed phrases, session keys that kill transaction popups mid-game, and a paymaster so players never touch gas.
A rollup-as-a-service designed specifically for onchain games, giving studios scalable, low-latency block space instead of competing for space on general-purpose chains.
Player-owned assets, interoperable items, and open-source, provably-fair reward distribution for in-game and real-money economies.
Cartridge is a B2B infrastructure business. Its direct customers are game studios and developers building onchain games and autonomous worlds; its indirect users are the players of those games. Dojo is open source, which seeds a developer ecosystem that adopts the wider Cartridge stack.
Ecosystem titles include Loot Survivor, Eternum, Paved, and Dope Wars - plus studios like Jokers, Popularium, Evolute, Chaos and Provable.
Two things held the category back: brutal user experience (seed phrases, gas, endless signing popups) and economies whose rules nobody could actually verify. Cartridge attacks both. The Controller hides the wallet behind passkeys and a paymaster; Dojo puts the game's rules onchain where anyone can read them.
Where most projects put only assets onchain, Cartridge's approach is to run the whole world there - the difference between owning a sword and owning the physics of the world the sword lives in.
What makes it different. Rather than shipping a single game or a generic NFT marketplace, Cartridge ships the full vertical stack for fully onchain games and open-sources the core engine. The focus on autonomous worlds - persistent, provable game state, not just tradable assets - sets it apart from asset-centric web3 gaming platforms.
The market. Cartridge sits in onchain and web3 gaming infrastructure, built natively on Starknet and Cairo. It competes for developer mindshare with the likes of Immutable, Ronin, and EVM-based autonomous-world frameworks such as MUD - but stakes out the provable, fully-onchain end of that spectrum.
BITKRAFT Ventures led the $7.5M Series A in August 2024, with StarkWare, Dune, Fabric, Primitive and Ergodic participating.
Tarrence van As and Calvin Dunwoody start Cartridge Gaming Company in Brooklyn to build tools for onchain games.
The team begins leading the open-source Dojo toolchain and ships the game-native Cartridge Controller wallet.
BITKRAFT Ventures leads the round with StarkWare, Dune, Fabric, Primitive and Ergodic participating.
Cartridge releases Dojo 1.0, launches Slot, and runs the Dojo Sensei Residency and game jams to grow the builder community.
Dope Wars, one game in the ecosystem, is an onchain remake of a drug-trading game that ran on the TI-83 graphing calculator in the late 1990s.
The Controller runs inside a sandboxed iframe at x.cartridge.gg that holds keys and signs transactions - the game never touches them.
About 14 people lead an open-source protocol used across the Starknet gaming ecosystem.
The name is a nod to classic gaming: a cartridge is the physical game format, and “gg” is gamer shorthand for “good game.”
The Dojo Sensei Residency was an eight-week program in New York City to train onchain game builders.
Cartridge builds infrastructure for fully onchain games and autonomous worlds. Its main products are the Dojo engine, the Cartridge Controller wallet, and Slot, a game-specific execution layer.
Dojo is Cartridge's open-source protocol and toolchain for building provable, fully onchain games and autonomous worlds on Starknet. Dojo 1.0 provides a framework for complex game logic and state.
It was founded in 2022 by Tarrence van As (CEO) and Calvin Dunwoody. The company is based in Brooklyn, New York, with team members also in Austin, Texas.
Cartridge raised a $7.5M Series A in August 2024 led by BITKRAFT Ventures, bringing total disclosed funding to roughly $10.5M.
The Cartridge Controller uses passkeys and social login instead of seed phrases, session keys to remove transaction popups during play, and a paymaster so players do not have to pay gas.