In early 2021, most NFT projects were static profile pictures you could trade, but we wanted to explore whether digital collectibles could evolve, grow, and become something more meaningful through blockchain technology.

GangstaBet launched on ICON as a collection of 5,555 gangsters and detectives where owners could upgrade their character’s skills, change names, and shape their journey using a utility token generated by the NFTs themselves.

What happened next changed our trajectory completely because the collection became the most popular NFT on ICON, attracting a community that wasn’t interested in flipping digital art but genuinely curious about what web3 could enable beyond speculation.

We never planned to go beyond the NFT collection, but our communities’ passion drove us to create The Emerald City in 2022, a virtual world owned entirely by the community with 11,111 land blocks where players could own territory and participate in a player-driven economy.

Gang Wars launched later that year as our first real game, a strategic simulation where NFTs competed in territorial battles across city zones. Players formed alliances, competed for rewards, and proved that web3 games could be genuinely engaging while creating utility for digital assets. The game found its audience on ICON, but we knew staying on one blockchain would limit what we could build.

In 2024, we partnered with TOWER Ecosystem and Animoca Brands to expand Gang Wars to Base, introducing free characters and NFT rentals to remove barriers keeping players out.

We got ambitious with cross-chain tournaments using ICON’s General Message Passing protocol, connecting players from ICON, Base, and Arbitrum in unified competitions where people from completely different ecosystems could compete together.

The technology worked beautifully, but we learned a harder lesson about community because building across multiple chains fragments your audience, and maintaining engagement across different ecosystems drained resources faster than we expected.

We launched GangstaVerseDAO to give $CROWN holders real governance power over treasury allocation and feature prioritization. We kept experimenting with smaller projects like Rock, Paper, Scissors, learning what players actually wanted versus what we assumed they wanted.

Then came the moment that changed everything.

In 2024, we built Beatdown Inc. on Sui and showcased it at Sui Basecamp Paris where people seemed genuinely excited about the fighting game we’d created. But our testers finished the demo in days, and we realized the game felt finite despite running on blockchain because it still required our servers, our databases, our continued operation to function.

If we shut down or moved on, the game would disappear just like any traditional game. We were building the same old model with a web3 wrapper, which contradicted everything blockchain promised about permanence and true ownership.

We made the difficult decision to abandon Beatdown Inc. completely and commit to building fully on-chain.

Vendetta represents that complete shift, built entirely on Sui with Walrus for decentralized storage and Seal for encrypted gameplay mechanics where players build criminal empires in Black Haven by capturing territory, raiding rivals, and managing resources.

What makes it fundamentally different is that it genuinely can’t be shut down because even if our company disappeared tomorrow, the game continues since all the mechanics, all the state, and all the assets exist permanently on-chain.

The Sui community welcomed us as one of the first fully on-chain games on the network, and partnerships with Walrus Foundation and becoming a launch partner for Seal validated our approach.

We took Vendetta to events in the Philippines, Japan, Nigeria, and Nepal, showing people what becomes possible when you stop compromising on the core promise of blockchain gaming.

Going fully on-chain is harder because you’re accepting development constraints, educating players on unfamiliar concepts, and building infrastructure that doesn’t exist yet.

But you’re also building toward games that genuinely live forever, where communities can fork them if they want and ownership actually means something beyond a database entry pointing to centralized assets. We believe games should outlive their creators through decentralized infrastructure that ensures permanence, not through corporate IP ownership or publisher control.

We’re still early in understanding what fully on-chain gaming enables, but our journey took four years. We’re building games that can live forever, creating experiences that transcend their creators, and demonstrating what web3 gaming can become when it fully embraces its medium.