Animoca Brands leads $2.6m round of Korean startup’s blockchain game

South Korean open-source gaming startup Planetarium has raised US$2.6 million for its decentralized role-playing game (RPG) Nine Chronicles, with Hong Kong blockchain gaming firm Animoca Brands leading the round.

Divergence Ventures, Ideo CoLab, Sfermion, Hypersphere Ventures, and SkyVision Capital joined the fundraise, with Axie Infinity co-founder Jeffrey Zirlin and Aave Protocol CEO Stani Kulecho also participating in the round. This comes ahead of the game’s governance token launch on Ethereum.

Photo credit: Nine Chronicles

Planetarium will use its new funding to hire content development talent, scale its network infrastructure, and expand onto multiple gaming platforms.

Currently on early access for the PC, Nine Chronicles is an idle game where players fight dungeon monsters across different stages to earn items, mine for gold, and transact for materials with other players. The game’s fighting portion is automated, with players’ input limited to equipping and upgrading items and other peer-to-peer activities.

The game was developed on the Libplanet blockchain engine, which allows it to run even if it’s not connected to a central server. This means, however, that players’ progress must be done on the blockchain to be recorded.

“The future of RPGs is moving in a direction where the players and the community collaborate on a shared vision, and we look forward to building such a foundation for Nine Chronicles with new governance programs,” said Planetarium co-founders and CEOs JC Kim and Kijun Seo in a statement.