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Basejump unveiled its Web3 social gaming platform with an AI-powered gaming substrate dubbed Action that lets players create their own games.
The company has also raised a strategic investment round from Community Labs. Set to debut in early 2025, Basejump allows players to earn, explore, and share game assets, and even create entire games.
Basejump is powered by Action, an open, AI-driven substrate developed by the Basejump team, which enables users to generate content without any coding skills, making game creation more accessible and interactive.
Action operates on AO, the distributed supercomputer that leverages Arweave's permanent storage technology to ensure that user-created content, such as game assets and worlds, is stored on the blockchain and accessible indefinitely.
"Basejump is a discovery surface for the 3.2 billion people who use avatars across games and digital worlds," said Matt Mason, CEO of Basejump, in a statement. "Imagine a place where you can bring your game characters, items, and skins into an expanding universe of worlds you can instantly create and explore. This dream is finally possible thanks to the AO supercomputer."
Lex Johnson, chief creative officer, said in a statement, "Building on Action's AI capabilities and AO's powerful infrastructure, users will be able to bring unique, interoperable game worlds and assets to life. And thanks to Arweave, these creations will live on permanently. The opportunities for new cultural and commercial experiences are incredible."
"Basejump's unique approach to blending social gaming with AI-driven creation on AO's infrastructure is exactly the kind of groundbreaking initiative that aligns with our mission," said Tate Berenbaum, CEO of Community Labs, in a statement. "We're excited for this partnership and the opportunity to support their vision of reshaping the future of gaming."
Community Labs is uniquely positioned at the center of the Arweave and AO ecosystem, dedicated to building foundational tools and infrastructure to solve key challenges faced by developers and users. The organization's mission is to drive innovation and create impactful solutions. Through its venture studio, Community Labs equips founders and teams with the resources needed to identify, develop, and scale product ideas from inception to mass adoption.
Action is an open, permissionless gaming substrate, made possible by AO's horizontally scalable on-chain computing, that lets users create AI-powered game experiences, avatars and interoperable game assets.
AO is a hyper-parallel computer (in fact, a supercomputer created through the aggregation of unused GPUs) designed to provide trustless and cooperative compute services without practical scalability limits. It combines the trust minimization benefits of blockchain networks with the speed and scalability of traditional compute environments.
Key features include support for an arbitrary number of parallel processes, unbounded computation capabilities, and seamless integration with Arweave for data storage. This architecture enables developers to create scalable, efficient, and verifiable decentralized applications.
Origins
Formerly known as Dazzle Ship, the company released an NFT collection about 18 months ago. Based on the community that formed around the metaverse-like spaces, the company decided to create Basejump, starting with interoperable game avatars, Mason said in an interview with GamesBeat.
With his cofounders (Brent Fitzgerald, CTO; and Lex Johnson, CCO), Mason started imagining the next iteration of the internet and what it would need. At some point, he hopes the Web3 technology like wallets will just work and fade into the background as players get to have a magical experience. The work started in November 2022. The team has three founders and five more people.
"There are 3.2 billion people using game avatars in the world today," he said.
But those avatars don't work when moving from game to game. Rivals such as Ready Player Me have created their version of interoperable avatars playable across thousands of games. But Basejump has its own take on this and it would consider an alliance with Ready Player Me, Mason said.
"A lot of worlds have walls between them, but more and more of them will have less walls," he said. "It's getting easier to take something from a game and use it as a feature in a social network, or vice versa," Mason said. "And so Basejump is really built for that reality."
The company started building it a year ago and teamed up with Community Labs, which is the company building the tech for AO, which is related to Arweave, which has onchain scalable decentralized storage. AO is effectively doing decentralized GPU compute to help companies create metaverse-like experiences. Basejump raised money from Community Labs to build Action, the substrate that can make use of AO. The Action protocol will be an open, permissionless tool for connecting.
"AO does parallel computing on chain, so it lets you do large calculations or run large processes in a single block. And what that means is you could have a complex game character in a block," Mason said. "It's easy to use this tech to have a registry of game worlds and assets, and to create things using AI as well. With AO, you can speak and asset or a world into existence. It's like ChatGPT for games."
The company is working on alpha testing next week and hopes to launch in early 2025. The company doesn't have an NFT behind the project yet but it may eventually have one, Mason said.
"The business is really going to kick off in 2025," he said.
