Selling pickaxes to a gold rush that hasn't started
Most blockchain games are a normal game with a few NFTs stapled on. Tarrence Van As wanted the opposite. He wanted the game itself - the rules, the map, the economy, the fights - to live onchain, where nobody who runs a server can quietly change it, delete it, or keep the money. That is a strange and specific thing to want, and building the tools to make it possible is what Cartridge does.
Van As is co-founder and CEO of Cartridge, a roughly 14-person company registered on Sterling Place in Brooklyn. Cartridge leads development of Dojo, an open-source toolchain for building what the industry calls "provable games" and "autonomous worlds" on Starknet, a network that uses zero-knowledge proofs to squeeze a surprising amount of computation onto a blockchain.
The pitch is not really to players. It is to the developers who would otherwise have to hand-write a lot of low-level Cairo and invent their own framework, which is exactly what teams had to do in 2022. Cartridge sells the shovels: an engine, a wallet, and a scaling service. The games that use them - Loot Survivor, Paved, Dope Wars - carry other people's names in the credits. That is by design.
In August 2024 the company raised a $7.5 million Series A led by BITKRAFT Ventures, the gaming-focused fund, with Fabric, Dune, StarkWare, Primitive and Ergodic along for the round. Total funding stands around $10.5 million. The money buys time to keep working on a market that Van As freely admits is still niche - which is the honest position for someone building infrastructure a decade before he thinks it pays off.
The autonomous worlds that will become ubiquitous in 5 or 10 years will be the ones that are founded today.
Tarrence Van AsTen years early, every time
There is a pattern to Van As's career, and the pattern is showing up early to the same idea over and over: software you can trust without trusting the company that made it. He learned about Bitcoin in 2013, bought some, and started building wallet applications when that was a fringe hobby. By 2015 he was in the Ethereum ecosystem writing smart contracts, years before "smart contract" meant anything to most engineers.
The resume in between is not crypto at all. He studied computer science engineering at the University of Michigan. He worked at Box, the enterprise file-sharing company. He spent time at Magic Leap, the mixed-reality outfit, where he did deep learning research on reconstructing three-dimensional worlds from cameras worn on a person's head. Building worlds you could see through a headset turned into building worlds that live on a blockchain. Same obsession, different substrate.
The bridge was Dope Wars, an onchain NFT project inspired - genuinely - by the drug-dealing game that came bundled on TI-83 graphing calculators. It launched shortly after Loot, and building it taught Van As precisely where blockchains break when you try to run a game on them. Transactions too slow. Fees too high. Wallets too hostile to anyone who is not already a crypto native. Cartridge is, in a sense, the itemized list of everything that broke, turned into products.
He co-founded the company in 2022 with Calvin Dunwoody. The bet is not that onchain games are big now. It is that the ones that matter in ten years are being founded now, and the teams building them need infrastructure that does not yet exist. So he is building it, and waiting.
Buys first Bitcoin; builds early wallet apps.
Enters Ethereum; ships smart contracts.
Engineering at Box.
Magic Leap: mixed reality & 3D-world computer-vision research.
Contributes to Dope Wars, launched just after Loot.
Co-founds Cartridge with Calvin Dunwoody.
Dojo 1.0 ships; $7.5M Series A led by BITKRAFT.
Three products, one thesis
The thesis is that games should be owned by the people who play them. Making that buildable takes an engine, a wallet, and a way to scale. Cartridge ships all three.
Dojo
Open-source toolchain for provable games and autonomous worlds. Compatible with Unity, Unreal and Godot. Reached 1.0 in 2024.
Controller
A gaming smart-contract wallet. Uses passkeys and session keys so private keys sit in your device's secure enclave - and no seed phrase pulls players out of the game.
Slot
Described as the first rollup-as-a-service purpose-built for onchain games. The unglamorous, essential work of making a blockchain fast, cheap and invisible.
On friction, keys and credible promises
Constant transaction approvals create friction that pulls the player out of the game world.
Private keys are stored in your device's secure enclave, which can be a phone or computer.
Cairo 1.0 is proving to be an excellent developer experience.
This Series A funding marks a significant milestone as we accelerate onchain game development.
Talks & interviews
Cartridge & Starknet Gaming
Tarrence on building a gaming console for onchain worlds.
Autonomous Agents in Dojo Worlds
A talk on agents inside fully onchain game worlds.
Inside Cartridge
On tooling, user experience and why Starknet.
The small stuff
- His path into web3 gaming ran through a TI-83 calculator game reborn as Dope Wars.
- Before crypto, he reconstructed 3D worlds from head-mounted cameras at Magic Leap.
- On X he goes by "tarrence" with a torii-gate emoji, a nod to Torii, Cartridge's Dojo indexer.
- Cartridge runs a "Dojo Sensei" residency for onchain game builders in NYC.
- Dojo works with mainstream engines - Unity, Unreal and Godot - not just crypto-native tools.
Where this goes
The aspiration is deliberately unglamorous: make fully onchain games practical enough that studios ship them without reinventing the plumbing. That means the engine, the wallet and the scaling all have to be good enough to disappear.
The market is small today. Van As's argument is that this is exactly the moment to build the tools - because the worlds that matter in a decade are being founded now, by people who need infrastructure that only exists if someone builds it first.
Links
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