Hello World

Two years ago, shortly after the creation of the Dope Wars universe, we embarked on a quest to build a new type of game, inspired by a classic 1984 arbitrage game, built entirely onchain, leveraging the inherent properties of the blockchain.

Roll Your Own endeavored to roll back the time to the burgeoning late 90s/early 00s modding scene, when building on top of the lores of our childhood was commonplace, when players felt a deep attachment to their communities, and when emergent creativity led to an explosion in innovative mechanics and new genres.

This is the promise of Autonomous Worlds. A substrate for the expression of our collective creativity, digital universes with the intrinsic properties of the physical world - natively composable and extensible - and the blockchain - unstoppable and credibly neutral. Providing the autonomy and foundation necessary for the collaborative development of these new digital universes.

However, realizing this promise escaped us as we soon encountered the many significant challenges that obstructed its progression. It was this recognition that led us to found Cartridge.

Introducing Cartridge

Cartridge is a team of blockchain native builders - world class engineers and designers - on a mission to bring onchain games and Autonomous Worlds to life. We're building games as well as the tooling and infrastructure to enable them. Over the past year, we have been heads down executing: rethinking the blockchain stack in light of the unique requirements of onchain games, working to solve challenging problems around scalability, reputation and hidden information, leveraging affordances provided by new technologies such as zkps, mpc and secure enclaves to do so.

Infrastructure:

• Controller: Our first product, a portable player account and profile. Leveraging Account Abstraction on Starknet, we demonstrated the first implementation of Webauthn and Passkeys for transaction signing along with session keys, providing a seamless onboarding experience for players and onboarding over 5000 accounts to games like Briq, Topology’s Mumu, Influence, and Realms.
  
  

• Dojo: The provable game engine and toolchain for building onchain games. Cartridge, Realms and Briq co-created this public good, and Cartridge has led its development since early this year. Dojo provides a foundation for provable games, providing an ECS framework, a migration planning and deployment tool with Sozo, real-time automatic indexing with Torii and a high performance, modular sequencer with Katana. Today, Dojo has a thriving community of builders experimenting with onchain games and new teams spinning up every week.
  
  

• Slot: Our managed infrastructure offering, providing the tooling necessary to easily fork, index, and scale onchain games - from local development, to multiplayer play testing, to large scale, multi-region, sharded deployments - all from the convenience of the command line.
  
  

• World Explorer: Taking advantage the structure provided by Dojo to build a generalized interface for exploring the past, for interacting with the present and for creating the future of onchain games and Autonomous Worlds. World Explorer will be a key enabler, providing players and developers a lower level interface to observe onchain state and a generalized interface for managing the collaborative, evolutionary process of building autonomous worlds.

Games:

• Roll Your Own: The classic, fully onchain arbitrage game, built with Dojo, deployed to a Cartridge hosted game chain. Currently in alpha testing with over 1000 rounds played during Season 1. Stay tuned for Season 2, arriving at the end of September. Play / Code
  
  

• Drive AI: An ambitious experiment pushing the boundaries of verifiable compute. The road-fighter inspired simulation environment incorporates a full onchain physics engine and neural network inference. Train your model and prove its performance using a zero knowledge proof, without ever having to reveal the solution. A collaborative project between the Cartridge, Giza and Starknet Explorations team. Code
  
  

• Tsubasa: A football game based on the popular manga series of the same name. It's a simulation based on the rules of the game, but with a twist: the players are able to use superhuman techniques, such as the Tiger Shot, to make the game more exciting. A collaborative project between Cartridge and Starknet Explorations team. Code

Funding Announcement

Today, we are excited to announcement our $5m seed round, backed by an all star lineup of incredible investors, co-lead by Dune and Chapter One with participation by Geometry, Fabric, Starkware, Volt and others.

Together, Cartridge, Dojo, and Starknet are laying the foundation for the onchain gaming ecosystem. Join us in building the future.