web3-gaming
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Gala and the trouble with owning the farm
The people who helped make virtual farms a business now want players to own the land. Gala’s experiment has grown into games, music, film and a blockchain - with some very real bills attached.
The Blockchain That Voted to Stop Being a Blockchain
ThunderCore spent seven years making a blockchain fast enough to feel ordinary. Then exchange delistings forced a harder invention: deciding what was worth saving when the chain itself no longer was.
Idan Zuckerman Is Building a City That Refuses to Reset
The Upland co-founder spent two decades learning how games ship. Now he is testing whether a virtual city can outlast the hype cycle - and whether players can keep what they build.
Dirk Lueth Built a City Game Around the Hard Part: An Economy
The Upland co-founder spent a career studying currencies, building media and fintech companies, and mentoring startups. Then he turned those habits toward a persistent city game where ownership, trade, and economic restraint matter as much as play.
Cartridge
Cartridge is an onchain gaming infrastructure company building the tools and platform that let studios ship fully onchain games and autonomous worlds. It leads development of Dojo, an open-source engine and toolchain for provable games on Starknet, and pairs it with the Cartridge Controller (a game-native smart contract wallet using passkeys, session keys and a paymaster) and Slot, a rollup-as-a-service execution layer. The goal is to give players real ownership of in-game economies while keeping onboarding as smooth as a traditional game.
Tarrence Van As
Tarrence Van As is the co-founder and CEO of Cartridge, a New York-based company building the infrastructure for fully onchain games. Cartridge leads development of Dojo, an open-source toolchain for provable games and autonomous worlds on Starknet, alongside Controller, a passkey-based smart contract wallet, and Slot, a rollup-as-a-service for game developers. A University of Michigan computer science engineer who bought his first Bitcoin in 2013 and shipped Ethereum smart contracts by 2015, Tarrence previously worked on mixed reality at Magic Leap before helping build the Dope Wars NFT ecosystem and founding Cartridge in 2022. In August 2024 the company raised a $7.5M Series A led by BITKRAFT Ventures.
Ola Guild Games
Ola Guild Games (OLA GG) is the largest Web3 gaming community in the Spanish-speaking world, operating as a regional subDAO of Yield Guild Games. Founded by lifelong Hispanic gamers, it onboards players across Latin America and Spain into blockchain games through NFT scholarships, Web3 education, and a shared-rewards model that lets people play and earn without upfront cost. In 2022 it raised $8 million in seed funding from investors including Galaxy Interactive, BITKRAFT, and Arca.
Nico del Pino
Nico del Pino is the co-founder and CEO of Ola Guild Games (OLA GG), the largest web3 gaming community in the Hispanic world. A subDAO of Yield Guild Games, OLA GG sets out to turn play into financial inclusion for the 500-million-plus Spanish-speaking market across Latin America and beyond. A crypto and fintech operator for more than a decade, del Pino co-founded Liquid Meta (the first publicly traded liquidity-mining company), ran fintech at Endeavor, and led sales at NASDAQ-listed dLocal before betting his career on the idea that owning your in-game economy could change a household's bottom line.