When Michael Sanders, co-founder of Horizon blockchain Games, first met Ethereum inventor Vitalik Buterin in January 2014, he fell in love with the future of the Internet and the idea of new applications and experiences where both users and creators shared in the value of what they make. “After meeting Vitalik, I believed he’s here from the future and here to teach us about technology, economics, and love,” Sanders said to me recently.

The cornerstone principles of technology, economics and love had a huge impact on Sanders. After meeting his Horizon Blockchain co-founder and CEO Peter Kieltyka in 2017, he finally felt blockchain games provided an outlet for all three pillars. “That was my holy shit moment, and I realized this was how we could welcome the world to web3 and do it in a really kind and loving way,” Sanders said.

They formed Horizon Blockchain Games at the end of 2017 with a mission to make web3 easy, fun and accessible for anyone. To do so, the company leverages two major products—Sequence, an all-in-one developer platform and smart wallet to make building web3 games, applications, and experiences easy, and Skyweaver, which is Horizon’s free-to-play web3 trading card game.

While on-chain gaming is growing it has yet to have a breakthrough that attracts a mainstream audience. Axie Infinity, which allowed players to earn an income, was taking in $10 million a day at its peak but faced criticism for not being fun and has since shown to be unsustainable. Earlier this year it was bringing in about $5,000 a day, according to research by Pantera Capital.

The global gaming industry is now worth over $300 billion with 2.7 billion people playing regularly, according to a 2021 report by Accenture. Growth, which shows no signs of slowing down, has been spurred by mass mobile phone adoption, increased screen time and a greater need for social interaction during the pandemic. The blockchain part of the gaming market is expected to grow to $65.7 billion by 2027 from $4.6 billion in 2022, according to research by MarketsandMarkets. 

Skyweaver cards

The games powered by Sequence can be blockchain native with the whole game on chain or can be limited to a few select items. It depends on the game and ultimately, it’s up to the developers and the game itself as to how on-chain a specific game will be. 

Horizon currently powers about 60 different projects that have either integrated or are in the process of integrating. “With our game Skyweaver, it’s really just the cards—the game items themselves—that are on-chain along with the marketplace, and then the gameplay is cryptographically secure,” Sanders said.

Another example Sanders provided of a minimal on-chain game was Hunters On-Chain by Boomland, a role-playing game “that has different items on-chain, but the whole gameplay experience is not on-chain, just in different items you can unlock.”

He continued, “There’s also Mech where you can buy Mech Warriors, which are NFTs, and control these big 30 or 40 foot tall robots in the game. You can also customize the Mech’s characteristics—like skins—which are also NFTs, and create your own levels and worlds in the game—which are registered on-chain—that can be sold to other people.”

Sanders contrasts these more “minimal on-chain experiences” with that of Sunflower Land from Thought Farm, a farming simulator. “Everything you use in-game—from seeds to crops—you can buy and sell, and there’s this whole real-world economy around it,” he said. “You can even donate to charities in the game. It's such a broad spectrum of what you can put on-chain.”

Sequence makes it possible to customize how much on-chain gaming developers and players want in the gaming experience. “Sequence as a developer platform and smart wallet powers all different kinds of games and applications, some of which will be fully on-chain, others which will have a minimal web3 enhancement to them,” Sanders said. “It can really power any web3 application, regardless of how much of that application they want to have on-chain.”

Read more: The Founding Premise of Blockchain-based Games Is Still Solid, Pantera Capital Says

As for the future of web3 gaming, Horizon’s smart wallet is a key component, Sanders said. “A wallet is both a developer tool and an end-user application,” he said. “Every game needs a wallet to onboard its users, and every end-user needs a wallet to access a web3 application. We’ve created something called a smart contract wallet—and we’re really pioneers in this domain. It’s a next generation wallet that represents the future of access to web3 by harmonizing seamless [user experience] with web3’s noncustodial and secure principles—harmonizing the best of both worlds—designed for both today and future decades.”

Another pain point for on-chain gaming is the cost of paying for gas to enable blockchain transactions. Sequence gives its users an option to bypass this.

“We also created something called a ‘Relayer,’ which allows for gasless transactions,” Sanders said. “Gas fees are a nuisance and can create a lot of friction, especially for new users, so we just abstract them away with the Relayer. Projects can then sponsor transactions, and their users never need to think about—or pay for—gas fees. We also make it easy for users to buy items in-game—helping people to buy NFTs and web3 collectibles using credit or debit.”

Having in-game marketplaces means you don’t have to drive users to a third-party marketplace to buy and trade items, which Sanders said can feel sketchy for some players. If the marketplace is in-game, he said, it’s more trusted and provides users with a more seamless trading experience while also being able to monetize transaction fees—another revenue stream for builders. 

Horizon’s current focus is on helping more games, applications and brands enter web3. “We’ll be announcing more partnerships coming up, ranging from games to mapping technology to loyalty reward programs to token-gated experiences that different companies and brands are building,” Sanders said. “This ranges from start-ups to some of the most recognized web2 tech and consumer oriented brands, all with the purpose of enabling a lot more web3 content to exist.”