Today, we’re excited to share an update. Since founding Horizon in January 2018, we’ve been on a mission to pioneer a new dimension of gaming that belongs to its players and creators. We’ve been working hard to build the right team, the right technology, and the right products to make this new dimension real. Our team has grown to 24 full-time members, and we are proud of the culture and values we’re building our organization around.

To kick off the year, we raised an additional $5 million in a round led by Initialized Capital. We are welcoming ConsenSys, CMT Digital and Regah Ventures as new investors, and want to thank our existing partners Golden Ventures, DCG and Polychain, for their continued support. We’re honoured to have the strategic and financial backing of world-class partners and experts to supercharge our vision. We’ll use these funds to deliver our first game to market and continue to build and evolve our blockchain infrastructure for open and standardized virtual items.

Last summer, we revealed our first product, a digital trading card game — SkyWeaver — that paves the way for player-owned economies by leveraging blockchain technology. Since then, SkyWeaver has come a long way, and the response and engagement from our Private Beta have been incredible. With 12,000 playtesters, and 90,000+ more players awaiting access, we already have a wonderful community that we’re extremely grateful for. We’ve been balancing the game, making tons of UI and UX improvements based on user feedback, and have been testing our Marketplace.

As part of our Private Beta, the SkyWeaver Preseason is already live, and SkyWeaver Season 0 begins later this month! With 500 unique cards to choose from, Season 0 players will compete for top spots on the leaderboard, and the top 1,000 players will earn rewards that they’ll be able to play with, trade and sell once Open Beta begins later this year. (Protip: come join us on our Discord and get early beta access).

Our players have created beautiful fan art, users have built awesome third-party tools like skyweaverdecks.com, and the community has already organized two tournaments — a testament to SkyWeaver’s compelling gameplay. In addition to the gameplay, we’re excited to see how the community-oriented economy design separates SkyWeaver from any game that’s come before it.

SkyWeaver is free-to-play, and by playing ranked matches, players can ascend the competitive leaderboard to win a crypto-token called Weave. Weave can be traded and it can be used to craft rare SkyWeaver Gold cards. Players can play with these cards, build decks with these cards, trade or sell them on the open market. In fact, players can sell and trade their cards on the built-in SkyWeaver marketplace or on any other marketplace that supports our open multi-token standard, ERC-1155 (more on this below).

Our original vision for SkyWeaver back in 2018 was to offer our players an open economy with Play-to-Earn incentives. Our unique leaderboard design with Weave and Gold card rewards helps to realize this vision via a free-to-enter reward market designed for skill-based play. The only way SkyWeaver Gold cards are minted into existence is through the weekly leaderboard won by the top SkyWeaver players. To acquire a Gold card, you’ll have to win it or buy it from another player.

To make SkyWeaver possible, we’ve developed a number of novel protocols and transaction infrastructure for Ethereum. Through clever and careful design, we’ve architected an Ethereum-based blockchain stack for virtual worlds that is non-custodial (i.e. players have full ownership of their items), user-friendly and easy to build on. Even with no prior knowledge of blockchain, each and every player will be able to store, manage and trade their virtual items with a user-friendly wallet that we provide. Or, for those more familiar with blockchain, they’re welcome to use any other Ethereum wallet.

We also co-authored the ERC-1155 token standard for putting virtual game items on the Ethereum blockchain, and we built the infrastructure to simplify the ownership, transfer and exchange of these items. We’ve performed multiple audits of our systems and are open sourcing our work for other projects to benefit from and incorporate blockchain superpowers into their video games. Similarly to how Epic Games released Unreal to showcase the Unreal Engine, we’re releasing SkyWeaver to showcase our blockchain stack for open virtual worlds with novel player incentives and new monetization possibilities. We are incredibly excited about SkyWeaver’s future and we hope you will love it as much as we do.

Thanks again to our amazing community and investors for supporting and joining us on our journey. We’re excited about building an increasingly diverse and collaborative ecosystem, and we look forward to sharing more of our technology and products publicly — beginning with SkyWeaver.

Love,

Peter + the entire Horizon team