MatchboxDAO, a Starkware-based on-chain gaming ecosystem, has raised $7.5 million in its first funding round to continue improving crypto games built on the Ethereum scaler StarkNet.
The funding round was backed by prominent blockchain investors, including Starkware, Geometry Research, ReadyPlayerDAO, Neon DAO, Road Capital, Formless Gamma, and Bonfire Union.
“Matchbox is helping new gaming apps to set foot in expanding the gaming realm of the StarkNet ecosystem,” said Uri Kolodny, StarkWare’s co-founder and CEO. “Their support and mentorship for game builders are an important contribution for StarkNet.”
StarkNet is a scaling solution for Ethereum built by Starware and uses rollups. Instead of processing transactions on the blockchain’s mainnet, rollups move activity off-chain to ease congestion.
“Matchbox is on the route to building the next wave of infrastructure for the next-gen of games,” said Yonatan Ben-Shimon, Matchbox Foundation’s CEO. “Composable games and Dapps that empower devs and creators as well as hundreds of millions of users.”
The freshly-raised funds will be used to develop the two core products of MatchboxDAO, namely Matchbox Spark and Matchbox Studios.
Matchbox Spark incubates gaming products on StarkNet, while Matchbox Studios is a set of development tools to accelerate game development on Starknet.
“Matchbox Spark is already happening for a month but we've come up with a new structure as we get more and more traction,” Ben-Shimon told Decrypt. “MatchBox Studio will be announced soon.”
Bringing crypto games to Starknet
In order to tokenize an in-game asset on the blockchain, gamers must pay gas fees.
Unfortunately, due to Ethereum’s often sky-high gas fees and slow transactions, executing these kinds of transactions is not ideal for scalable gaming applications.
Layer-2 solutions like Starkware offer cheap and rapid transactions alongside improved privacy, making it an ideal candidate for game development.
“The privacy of ZKP is definitely why we wanted to be on StarkNet,” Ben-Shimon told Decrypt. “Having the possibility to hide information but to prove its existence on-chain is one of the major innovations for on-chain games (for a strategic game for example).”