Horizon’s Skyweaver Web3 card game launches Open Beta

Horizon Blockchain Games, the Web3 wallet and gaming company that co-created the ERC-1155 NFT standard, has launched the Open Beta for its free-to-play cross-platform Web3 trading card game – Skyweaver – to more than 345,000 users on the waitlist.

Skyweaver has amassed one of Web3’s largest communities, with more than three million matches played – accounting for upwards of 883,000 hours racked up in the private beta alone.

Skyweaver has garnered $13.3m in funding from a host of Web3’s most prominent VCs, including Coinbase, Initialized Capital, BITKRAFT, ConsenSys, and Polychain.

The company said that, because of this support, it now holds the potential to be the first Web3 game to break into the Web2 mass gaming market.

During the four years the company said its organic growth has delivered one of the largest user bases in Web3 and even Web2 gaming.

At 97,000 members, Skyweaver’s Discord has already outmatched the reach of popular Web2 trading card contemporaries, Hearthstone and Magic: The Gathering Arena.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, Initialized Capital, and 776 has been one of the investors in Skyweaver from the start. He said this was the first game that opened his eyes “to the vast potential of play-to-earn and NFT gaming”.

“I wrote about play-to-earn three years ago and the trend is even more obvious now,” he commented.

“The future of this space will be dictated by companies like Horizon, who have been hard at work building a community and meticulously refining their product to not only appeal to Web3 gamers but to gaming audiences at large.”

Players can win, own, trade, sell, and gift trading cards via Skyweaver’s built-in peer-to-peer decentralised marketplace.

The Skyweaver Market harnesses Horizon’s in-house developed Niftyswap Protocol — the first NFT automated market maker (AMM).

The protocol makes buying and selling NFTs easy and intuitive for players, with prices algorithmically calculated with no-bid or sell orders — allowing users to buy and sell NFT trading cards instantly.

Peter Kieltyka, co-founder & CEO at Horizon Blockchain Games, said the company sees Skyweaver as “bridging the gap that currently exists between the Web2 and Web3 gaming communities, with all the potential that holds for mass-market adoption and growth of the Skyweaver ecosystem”.

Skyweaver Open Beta launches where everyone can play for free and experience the new dimension of trading card games in which players gain tangible, digitally verified ownership over the Silver and Gold cards they win.

Highly-anticipated features are slated for release in 2022, including match replays and observer mode, in-game guilds, new cards, expansion sets, “Lethal Puzzle Games”, customisation of private matches, and cosmetics to personalise player experiences.