Horizon Blockchain Games announced that it has raised $3.75 million in a seed round, led by Reddit Co-Founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture fund, Initialized, with participation from Golden Ventures, Polychain, Coinbase, Digital Currency Group, and Inovia Capital.
The company has already built an online game, SkyWeaver, now in private testing, which innovates on the popular trading card genre. It has also created a blockchain video game network named Arcadeum, the Crypto Arcade. Arcadeum is built on the Ethereum network and will provide players with secure wallets to store their SkyWeaver assets, as well as assets from other blockchain games.
“Blockchain technology has given rise to the next generation of the Web: the Internet of value,” Peter Kieltyka, co-founder and CEO of Horizon Blockchain Games, said in a press release. “This new Web marks the transition from applications as networks to applications as economies that share and exchange value with their users and co-creators, providing revenue sharing at a protocol level. At Horizon, we’re passionate about giving games blockchain super-powers by offering our players the freedom to own and trade their digital items across an open Internet.”
“Peter and the Horizon team have impressed me as a company with great passion to make blockchain meaningful for games,” Ohanian said. “We are proud to have invested because not only do they have a long term future vision with a desire to make a positive impact on society, they are a far-seeing video games company, making engaging experiences that will give players all the benefits of digital and physical worlds colliding.”
And crypto exchange BITPoint Japan revealed that the roughly 50,000 users who lost funds in its recent hack will be reimbursed in digital currency.
Impacted customers have lost 2.06 billion yen ($20 million) in the breach, and will be reimbursed in crypto on a 1:1 basis. The company has estimated that losses from the security breach comes to around 3.02 billion yen ($28 million), according to CoinDesk.