SXSW Startups: Horizon Games
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 12, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Entertainment and Content, which will pitch at 3:30 pm Sunday, March 10, Horizon Blockchain Games makes blockchain-powered video games for dreamers, futurists, and digital citizens. They’re pioneering a new dimension of gaming that belongs to its players and building a crypto video game arcade called Arcadeum, which is a community-driven platform for decentralized games where players enjoy the freedom of true digital ownership, open economies, provable fairness, privacy, and the ability to earn real-world value through play.
Horizon’s first game, SkyWeaver, is a digital card game from the future, built on Ethereum, and it’s coming soon!
What is your competitive advantage?
We’re providing players with an experience they’ve never been able to have before. The blockchain and Arcadeum architecture we’re developing enables the future of gaming, where players benefit from truly owning their digital items, privacy, provable fairness, open economies, and the ability to earn real-world value through play.
We’ve got an incredible engineering team that cares a lot about system design, architecture and user experience.
We’re a team of incredibly passionate and fearless explorers, technologists, gamers, scientists, entrepreneurs, dreamers, artists, and storytellers who are committed to building a more free and open digital world. Everyone on our team is wholeheartedly aligned with our mission, which instills all of our work with a potent and loving energy. Our primary pursuit is to create something novel and exciting for people, and we’re on our way to achieving that.
What are your goals for SkyWeaver in 2019?
To ship the game this year and have people love it. We started developing SkyWeaver in January 2018. In a short amount of time, and targeting a network that is changing around us, we’re very proud of the progress we’ve made and of the great team we’ve built. We are excited to see how the world enjoys SkyWeaver and helps make it better. We aim to establish this new dimension of gaming and to bring truth and utility to blockchain networks.
Can you elaborate on how Horizon Blockchain Games achieves privacy and provable fairness?
By its very nature, decentralized infrastructure is protected from malicious actors and external influence. Many describe DApps (Decentralized Applications) as being “trustless,” in that users don’t need to exhibit trust in each other since the laws of the DApp itself govern every interaction. Players can maintain full privacy of their identity, and only identify through a pseudonym tied to their crypto wallet address where their game items reside. They engage with each other in competitive play where the rules are open to all, match history is deterministic, and every player move is cryptographically signed for authenticity. Moves are impossible to forge and breaking the rules is easily detectable. The provable fairness of the network supports the robustness and health of the DApp’s ecosystem and the value within.
Please explain the token standard you recently helped design, ERC-1155. Does it have implications beyond SkyWeaver?
While ERC-20 is designed for tracking the balances of one type of fungible tokens, ERC-1155 allows a single contract to track the balance of a very large number of types of tokens, fungible or non-fungible [a fungible token is something that is mutually interchangeable with another identical item. A $20 bill for example. Non-fungible tokens are unique and not mutually interchangeable. A house in New York City has a different value than a house in a small rural town]. ERC-1155’s ability to track the balance of a very large number of types of tokens provides simplicity for developers to manage multiple virtual currencies from a single contract, while offering potential cost reduction on transactions. Beyond SkyWeaver, people are interested in using ERC-1155 for loans, side-chains and applications requiring users to deposit their tokens in a contract.
Horizon Blockchain Games is currently based in Toronto, Canada. Tell us about it.
Toronto has an exciting startup ecosystem — from software to AI, VR, cannabis, health, food, music, blockchain, gaming, and more. In fact, we share office space with three inspiring companies from the blockchain space: Blockgeeks, which provides blockchain education, training and courses; Cosmos, which is the Internet of blockchains and works on interoperability amongst the different blockchains; and L4, from the Ethereum community, which is building Web3 and conducts cutting-edge cryptoeconomic research, builds core infrastructure, and helps projects grow. Simply being in our office is an incredible experience filled with inspiring people.
How did your team come together?
We founded Horizon Blockchain Games in January 2018.
Our CEO, Peter Kieltyka, co-founded and built two successful tech startups: Nulayer and Pressly. He also built a number of key open source libraries used by many large Internet companies around the world.
Our CTO, Ian Ha, has worked as a senior software engineer at various startups in the gaming, interactive media, financial services and gig-economy spaces.
Our Chief Scientist, William Hua, has more than a decade of experience as a software engineer in gaming and mobile app development. He also spent three years working on his PhD and solving cutting edge mathematics in computational geometry and mathematical optimization. He has an Erdős score of 2.
Our Chief Designer, Daniel Racca, has worked as a senior UI/UX designer at Mailbird and on various video games.
Our Chief Storyteller, Michael Sanders, co-founded a clean energy company, and is an investor and advisor to various startups in cryptocurrency, education, precious stones, music, and dance.
What trend is your team most excited about?
We’re very excited about the evolution of the Internet and our primary gateway to it, Web Browsers. Web Browsers are becoming our new Operating Systems (i.e. Windows, Mac OS X, Linux) and developments like HTTP3 are enhancing our experiences.
We’re excited about the idea of UBI (universal basic income) to afford people the basics, so that perhaps one day, people can enjoy more leisure time and other creative pursuits.
We’re excited to see our education systems disrupted and evolved through the use of technology to offer far greater personal learning potential. Everyone is different, and we hope that emerging educational systems will celebrate those differences.
We’re excited by advancements in health, lab-grown meats, therapies, deep learning, and self-driving cars. We’re excited by AR, VR, and new forms of entertainment. We’re excited by clean energy technology, space exploration, and traveling to new dimensions.
We’re excited about a lot, really. We’re excited about the future. And we’re grateful for the present moment.
What do you like best about the startup experience?
We most enjoy the opportunity to build better worlds, to pioneer something that benefits as many people as possible, and to do those things alongside the people we love. To create, to express and to feel connected through our creations.
Name three people, in any field, alive or dead, you’d like to meet and tell us why.
We have four, plus some honorable mentions:
Steve Jobs for being one of the best product creators to have ever existed.
Linus Torvalds for making and supporting one of the most important technologies of our era.
Christopher Nolan for his visionary storytelling.
Satoshi Nakamoto for birthing blockchain, the future of currency and the future of the Internet.
And honorable mentions: Brit Marling, Richard Feynman, Alan Turing.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
That a vision will manifest, so long as we hold that vision strongly and long enough for everyone else to see it. At first, only the founders will see the vision, but by carrying forward with loving and committed intentions and actions, more people will see the vision. Eventually, everyone will be able to see the vision.
We are all architecting reality together. Anything we can dream, we can do.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
