Betting on bringing IPs alive through new onchain primitives

GAMING CHRONICLES 123

Raiden

and

Memento | Oscar

Jun 11, 2025

Gaming Chronicles focuses on curating the latest web3 gaming news every week.

You will find the latest news, educational content, and game reviews.

TLDR :

Orange Cap Games raises $3.5M
Shards Protocol raises $2M
Sparkball migrates to Somnia

🗞️ NEWS

ORANGE CAP GAMES RAISES $3.5M

This week, Orange Cap Games (OCG) announced that it has raised $3.5M in a seed round led by 1kx and Yuga Labs (YL). The capital will be used to grow its Pudgy Penguins-themed TCG, Vibes, and develop new IP-based products
- In its first (angel) round back in September 2024, the studio raised $2M
Just about a couple of weeks ago, YL sold the Moonbirds IP to OCG. Only one year after YL acquired the IP itself
- We have yet to see what products the studio plans to build around the IP, but we can assume it will be a game or collectible experience
  - Part of this deal includes that Moonbirds will launch on the Otherside, and any new assets under the IP will live on the Apechain
- YL continues to divest from its NFT collections and products across the board, selling off CryptoPunk, Meebits, HV-MTL, and Legends of the Mara over the last year. The focus returns to its core collections, the Apes
Vibes is both a digital and physical trading card game, positioning itself as the “Pudgy TCG”. Thus far, 350K online games have been played, 4M+ cards have been sold, and the physical card packs are available at 100+ retailers worldwide
Pet3rpan from 1kx commented that their investment is a bet on companies showing they can bring IPs alive through new onchain primitives:
- “We continue to believe that the world's biggest IP to emerge over the next decade will have their roots in crypto”
The verticalization (my new favorite word) of OG NFT IPs continues to be a trend this year, as seen with Pudgy Penguins, Claynosaurz, Goblin Town, and now Moonbirds. Who’s breaking into mainstream next?

SHARDS PROTOCOL RAISES $2M

Another raise that was announced last week is that of Shards Protocol, raising $2M in a round with participation of Animoca, YGG, Kyber Ventures, ARC, and others
Initially, the company started as “Shards”, an SDK for game studios and a “new standard of Web3 monetization for gaming”. But earlier this year, the company rebranded to “Shards Protocol” (SP) with a new direction
- A combination of friend tech and gaming guilds
- According to the Premint page from last year, Kyber Ventures and Crypto.com were already investors back then. So, this round might be an extension, or the former raise was a pre-seed round
SP is adding to the product range of the studio, introducing a new flagship product called Aura: “a recognition layer that transforms your on-chain contributions into reputation and rewards”
- Users will be able to display their reputation score and collect badges, and show them directly on their Twitter profile
  - Multiple companies are working on an onchain reputation protocol, like gg.xyz and Zentry’s Radiant platform. However, I haven’t seen them integrate reputation directly into the social layer of Twitter
  - A similar idea to Ethos’ system, allowing you to directly see someone’s score on Twitter if you’re using the extension
The capital from this round will be used to expand on Aura. Plus, SP announced that its token will launch next week on the 17th
Lastly, I’d add that the CEO of SP is Corey Wilton, or he was during the time of Shards at least. Corey is also the founder of Mirai Labs, the makers of Pegaxy, Petopia, and PetM. Additionally, they are working on partnr and Mirai App
- I don’t think SP has ties to Mirai Labs, but it seems his time is spread thin across many crypto ventures, and he spun up a lot of businesses. This just makes me a bit sceptical about the upcoming token launch

SPARKBALL MIGRATES TO SOMNIA

After announcing its departure from Monad last week (after only joining in September 2024), Sparkball (SB) shares that it’s joining the Somnia Gaming ecosystem
- Perhaps this decision is a combination of Monad’s inability to launch so far and Somnia actively growing its library of games through Dream Catalyst (its Web3 game accelerator)
  - Variance is another game that just announced they joined Somnia as well
Currently, SB has its demo live on Steam as part of the Steam Next Fest (as mentioned in Monday’s newsletter). According to SteamDB, they have accumulated 1900+ wishlists so far
- One of the few teams that is trying more of a traditional marketing rollout, as pointed out by Hunter. Arguably, also one of the few games that can aim for the Web2 gamer audience
- On this topic, the team also released its official announcement trailer on IGN and GameInformer
SB is one of the games that has been in development for a while (similar to Wildcard), and has been in development for 9+ years, starting under the name Edenbrawl
- The game rebranded to its current name in 2022, released its first public early access event (or Alpha) in 2023, and initially planned a full release in 2024
- Now, the game has a planned release date for Q4 2025
In October 2024 announced the studio raised a round led by L1D and raised $2M. Their longevity with minimal funding appears largely driven by the founder’s (Chandler) persistence