Autonomous Worlds's 2023 In Review

Overall

It has been an incredible year for Autonomous Worlds. Throughout 2023, numerous fully onchain games and infrastructure projects have achieved significant milestones. At DevConnect Istanbullish Autonomous Worlds enthusiasts had the opportunity to come together and exchange ideas. It's been a year marked by substantial progress for everyone involved!

Let's take a look at what has accomplished over the past year.

January

Loot Realms Introducing ‘Proof of Labor’ to Realms: Eternum.

Lattice proposed the MUD v2, aiming to address three major challenges: their data encoding approach, the MUD-native data model, and the limitations of the ECS model.

Curio announced the launch of Treaty, a fully on-chain game, a classic 4x strategy game where players competed by securing land and building economies.

Axiom was announced as a ZK coprocessor for Ethereum. Axiom provided smart contracts with access to on-chain data and enabled expressive computation over it.

Tetration Lab announced that Museum Heist beta testing 1 is LIVE, a fully on-chain social deduction game with private state using homomorphic encryption and zkSNARK.

February

Bibliotheca Dao successfully executed BIP-7, selling 12.5 million $LORD tokens at a price of $0.05 each. The initial fundraising goal was $625,000, but this community-exclusive private sale round ultimately raised a total of $3,970,000, exceeding the target by 6.35 times.

LootRealms Open pre-alpha of Realms: Eternum.

Sky Strife held its first playtest, titled 'Amalgama playtest,' in January.

Curio raised $2.9M from Bain Capital Crypto, TCG Crypto, and others.

Ape's Gambit introduced itself, a battle royale game that uses familiar chess pieces and takes place on a chess board.

March

Pirate Nation Launched their first World Boss event, a special LIMITED time event and has the entire Pirate Nation player-base combating giant World Bosses.

Pirate Nation migrated from Polygon to Arbitrum Nova.

Conquest announced their first beta on gnosis chain.

Tetration Lab introduced Muddy Forest , a fully on-chain MMO RTS space conquest game.

GenkiCats is being introduced as the first fully on-chain mobile game and will be launching soon on Arbitrum.

April

The Cartridge team proposes to seed the Dope Wars Autonomous World on Starknet and to build ‘Roll Your Own’ on top of it.

SkyLab announced the Trailblazer tournament , a hidden strategies car-racing game.

Komorebi's hacker house in Tokyo.

May

Realms qualified for an ‘Early Adopter Grant’ of STRK to participate in network governance.

Loot survivor launched on starknet testnet.

dmstfctn co-authored LARGE LORE MODELS with Eva Jäger and Alasdair Milne , creating speculative tools for decentralized on-chain narrative construction, to be featured in the upcoming AUTONOMOUS WORLD N1.

1kx hosted 'The Summit,' bringing together 54 on-chain game builders and community members for discussions and networking in the on-chain game and autonomous worlds space.

Kamigotchi announced plans to mint on optimism instead of Canto.

June

Lord 's liquidity consolidated into mainnet and Starknet pools, and the Liquidity Pool in Arbitrum was deprecated.

Kakarot zkEVM has established Kakarot Labs and has officially been incorporated. They also closed a pre-seed round with investors.

AGLD DAO launched the Loot Chain, a dedicated Layer 2 blockchain for the Lootcommunity.

[Argus Labs]( https://Argus Labs) announced a $10 million seed round, with leading investment from HaunVentures.

Pragma organized the first Cairo 1.0 hackathon, organized by Pragma Oracle.

Briq announced that its factory went live.

July

$Lords bridged to Starknet.

PixeLAW won the 1st prize from Starknet at ETHGlobal Paris Hackathon.

Axiom announced the Axiom mainnet alpha release.

Rhascau has officially launched on the Arbitrum Nova mainnet, marking the beginning of Season 1.

DFArchon hosted the Dark Forest ARES v0.1 Round 1 event.

Mithraeum hosted The Iron Age I Tournament with a $94,880 reward pool, spanning 3 months from July 31st to October 31st.

CheDAO takes over Crypts and Caverns .

Komorebi’s hacker house in Paris.

Always Scheming launched newsletter, Dark Tunnels.

August

Bibliotheca DAO Open 1st Frontinus House: Genesis Grants.

DOJO hosted its first virtual Dojo Game Jam.

Paradigm has released a hero post that includes 10 areas they are exploring, with onchain games being one of them.

BladeDAO announced their fully on chain games, Loot royale.

Small brain games Introducing Words3, a crypto economic crossword game on Base.

Topology introduced Shoshin , a TPS-agnostic asynchronous strategy game on Starknet.

Topology held the Shoshin offline tournament in California, USA.

Norswap introduced 0xfable , a fully on-chain trading card game.

September

Loot Realms announced Beer Baron, an on-chain beer brewing board game.

DOJO announced ZK Night as the winner of the first Dojo Game Jam, a turn-based game.

AltLayer announced the launch of the "autonomous world" Rollup framework Turbo.

Cartridge introduces itself as an onchain gaming company with the following components: Infrastructure includes Controller, Dojo Slot, World Explorer, and focus includes Roll Your Own, Drive AI, and Tsubasa.

Cartridge hosted an onchain gaming event during ETH NYC with Topology, Lattice, dune ventures, Playmint and proof of play.

Tonk created "Privacy Playgrounds," a resource outlining hidden game mechanics and proposals for their implementation in trustless networks like on-chain game backends.

Proof of Play announced their $33 million seed round led by a16z and Greenoaks, with participation from angels and founders including Naval, Balaji, Justin Kan, immad, Nikil Viswanathan, Gabby Dizon, and many more.

Small Brain Games announced NETWORK STATES IS BEGINNING PLAYTESTS.

Small Brain Games announced GAUL will be playtesting in the Small Brain Games Discord.

Arcane Assemblers gradually revealed its development progress.

Gabby World held BETA Launch Party.

ggQuest hosted the Sky Strife Tournament.

October

Bibliotheca DAO updated their NEW Realms branding.

Loot Survivor MAINNET PRE RELEASE TOURNAMENT.

Paima receives 1.4M USD grant from the Cardano to built Autonomous World infrastructure

DOJO hosted DOJO Game Jam #2 and raised the prize pool to $10,000.

Herodotus successfully demonstrated the EthereumChain by utilizing a combination of Solidity, Cairo 0, and StarkWare's SHARP prover.

Etherplay announced conquest is open-source and immutable.

Minters announced that early adopters will have the opportunity to claim tokens in the Battle for Blockchain based on their Rhascau's Season 1 score and the previously announced distribution to NFT holders.

Battle for Blockchain, an onchain MMO Auto Battler developed by Minters , conducted its first playtest.

zKorp announced the debut of two of their games, zConqueror and zKnight on starknet.

FunDAOmental introduced Loot Underworld , an autonomous underworld occupying the liminal space between and underneath.

Novmber

Bibliotheca DAO Open 2rd Frontinus House: Genesis Grants.Lattice announced Redstone at Devconnect, a Plasma-inspired Alt-DA chain, built on the OP Stack.

Sky Strife launched season pass minting.

Lattice updated branding for Lattice, MUD and Redstone.

KKRT Labs announced the completion of its second investment round.

Tarochi , developed by paimastudios , has released its testnet.

DOJO held a Ninja School event in Istanbul during DevConnect.

AW Research Arpa network hosted AW DAY in Istanbul during Dev Connect.

Madara hosted KebDara - Madara Starknet in Istanbul during DevConnect.

Pragma announced its availability on the Starknet Mainnet.

ARPA Network announced Randcart, an on-chain verifiable random number generator, is now live on Base .

Grugs's Lair , originally a gaming guild, has announced its transformation into a game studio, starting with "Rising Revenant (RR)," which is the first of their pure On-Chain games.

THIS CURSED MACHINE , a sci-fi body horror fulfillment center simulator fully onchain games developed by Moving Castles , conducted its playtest during DevConnect in Istanbul.

SkyLab introduced their 3rd game on Project Mercury, Bid Tac Toe.

Autonomous Worlds Network hosted the Autonomous Worlds Assembly in Istanbul during Devconnect.

Primodium announced their next version fully onchain factory sim.

Citadel 2.0 raised a $3.3M Seed Round led by 1kx, with participation from Shima Capital, Hashed, Matchbox DAO, Ready Player DAO, and several angels.

Komorebi’s hacker house in Istanbul.

December

Realms.World announced Unlocking epoch 35+ LORDS from staking rewards.

Argus Labs has introduced Dark Frontier, the first production game running on the World Engine devnet, and has initiated two types of trial play.

DOJO announced the 3rd Dojo Holiday Game Jam with a prize pool of over 50,000 USD + 30,000 STRK tokens up for grabs.

Aether Sands , a fully onchain open-world game that draws inspiration from steam-punk, built with MUD announced its first playtest.

TENET announced ZUSE, a framework for building worlds with strong digital physics on MUD.