🚮 Game Over

GM! 

It’s Thursday, and that means we’re already prepping for a slightly longer weekend ahead. You’ll see The Drop come to your inbox tomorrow and Monday as part of something special.

Today we’re talking about a crypto game that was in development for just too long, plus what Mysten Labs’ cofounder knows about that Cetus hack.

— Kate Irwin

Another blockchain game bites the dust — after seven years

It’s apparently shut-down-your-crypto-game szn.

Ember Sword, a crypto MMORPG in development, has been cancelled. They say it’s because the team couldn’t get more funding for the game.

Ember Sword once used Polygon, then the Immutable X chain, then Mantle, asking early NFT buyers to migrate their assets from chain to chain over the years.

“In today’s market,” the team wrote in a message, all that’s left of its now-wiped website, “we couldn’t find a path to keep building. Our journey, and the servers, will go offline.”

So how much funding did Ember Sword have? It’s unclear. Bright Star Studios, the team behind the game, raised $700,000 in 2020 and another $2 million in 2021 in publicly disclosed rounds, according to data from BlockchainGamer.biz and a press release. Before 2020, Bright Star was called So Couch Studios.

In 2021 — a peak time for NFTs more broadly — prospective Ember Sword players collectively pledged a total of $203 million in NFT land sales for the unreleased game. 

VentureBeat reported in 2023 that the game had over $18 million in funding from investors ($7.1 million) and land sales, not including the game’s 2023 “Alpha land sale.”

As we’ve heard from some VCs recently, it’s not always a good idea to monetize your crypto game too early. 

It’s also difficult to know for certain how much money a studio has raised in total, as some blockchain partnerships and grant deals are not publicly disclosed.

Ember Sword had apparently been in development for over seven years, since 2018. The game only offered full early access in December 2024, though there have been some community opportunities to playtest earlier versions of the game since at least 2023.

The game’s token, EMBER, deployed in mid-2024 and is now down over 99% from its all-time high that it saw at its launch.

The studio previously ditched Unity in favor of developing its own game engine, and then cycled through five different proprietary engines before making a final decision (Bright Star’s website, now purged, has deleted its past webpages with these details).

“As a team we have developed and worked on 5 engines in total,” an archived copy of a webpage published in January 2023 from the studio’s site reads.

“Make no mistake — this is not just another browser game. This is a fully functioning highly competitive MMORPG,” the team claimed on that now-deleted page, further adding: “Having a game accessible via the browser is made possible by our own proprietary engine, Project SERIUS which allows for much higher accessibility, allowing hundreds of millions of users to enjoy it as opposed to a few million.”

Now, it looks like not even a single user will get to play it.

Ember Sword did not respond to my requests for comment.

Real Users. Real Products. Onchain.

Permissionless IV is for the teams building crypto that doesn’t feel like crypto.

Wallets that don’t suck. Loyalty programs that break out of Web2. NFTs with context. Consumer apps that actually ship.

It’s not about what the tech can do — it’s about what people are already using it for. Crypto meets culture, UX, and utility in Brooklyn this June.
 
📅June 24–26 | Brooklyn

Mysten Labs cofounder responds to Cetus hack

The Sui- and Aptos-based DEX known as Cetus has been exploited for an estimated $220 million, Mysten Labs cofounder and CPO Adeniyi Abiodun confirmed in an X Space this morning.

Abiodun explained that an attacker exploited a Cetus smart contract bug to swipe the crypto. He said that roughly $160 million of the funds are currently frozen, while $60 million are not (Cetus has said $162 million has been “paused”). 

Mysten Labs is the lead developer of the Sui blockchain, which has focused on gaming in recent years.

An investigation into the hack remains ongoing as of Thursday morning, as Cetus is attempting to retrieve the missing crypto. In the meantime, users shared screenshots of chaos resulting from the hack, including the apparent depegging of native USDC markets as multiple tokens on Cetus tumbled.

“This is not some system-level issue on Sui,” Abiodun emphasized repeatedly during the live Space. He said he didn’t yet know the nature of the bug. The price of CETUS, the DEX’s native token, fell up to 20% in response to the situation.

Former Binance CEO Changpeng “CZ” Zhao responded to the news: “We are doing what we can to help SUI. Not a pleasant situation. Hope everyone stay [sic] SAFU!”