Argus Labs Raises $10M In A Seed Funding Round Led By Haun Ventures

Argus Labs, a startup in the crypto gaming industry, has secured $10 million in a seed funding round that was led by Haun Ventures. The other investors that also participated in this funding round include Anagram, Alchemy, Dispersion Capital, and Robot Ventures.

Haun Ventures leads a $10M raise for Argus Labs

This funding round also included angel investors such as the co-founder of Gitcoin, Scott Moore, the co-founder of Sandbox VR, Siqi Chen, and the co-founder of Osmosis, Sunny Aggarwal.

Argus Labs is a gaming project, with its flagship product being World Engine. The latter is a software development kit (SDK) that will allow game developers to generate their own dedicated layer-two blockchain networks by leveraging zero-knowledge proofs on Ethereum.

The developers can also customize their blockchains and get to decide the extent by which they want their game to exist “on-chain.” Zero-knowledge proofs are used to verify zk-Rollup transactions, which is one of the technical innovations in crypto that support more transactions while enabling network scalability to boost privacy.

The founder of Argus, Scott Sunarto, is one of the co-creators of Dark Forest. The latter is a crypto game that was released in 2020. This game leverages ZKPs. According to Sunarto, more gaming elements could be brought on-chain at a significantly higher rate than the average person might think.

Sunarto held an interview with a crypto news publication saying that World Engine will support user-generated content through blockchain. The engine will also support complex games such as massive multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs) to allow them to exist fully on-chain.

Sunarto is going beyond Web3 offerings

The P2E gaming industry has been changing since the fizzling of the hype around Axie Infinity. As such, Sunarto is exploring new ways that crypto features can be integrated into video games. Sunarto noted that if there were more parts of a game on-chain, it meant that the players had more ingredients that they could use to build atop the game.

Sunarto has also addressed blockchain gaming ecosystems that allow players to create user-generated content saying that these would comprise a huge part of the ecosystem. Moreover, there was also a need to have a platform that allows players to code their own smart contracts to integrate new features and game elements.

Some of the features that will support the scalability of crypto games is sharding. Sharding is a technique that can help games adapt to the growing audiences and add new servers. The objective behind this offering is to allow the game developers to customize their offerings as the players become empowered to create their own communities and projects around Web3 games.

Haun Ventures has also said that none of the scalable blockchain networks, including Avalanche, Polygon, and Solana, have been optimized for gaming. However, Argus was focused on filling this gap. The platform expects that World Engine, with connected layer-two sharded blockchains, will play a significant role in the online gaming space.