Basejump has unveiled its Web3 social gaming platform with an AI-powered gaming substrate called Action that allows players to create their own games.

The company also raised a strategic investment round from Community Labs. Scheduled to debut in early 2025, Basejump allows players to earn, explore and share gaming assets, and even create entire games.

Basejump is powered by Action, an open AI-driven substrate developed by the Basejump team, which allows users to generate content without any coding skills, making game creation more accessible and interactive.

Action runs on AO, the distributed supercomputer that leverages Arweave’s persistent storage technology to ensure that user-created content, such as assets and game worlds, are stored on the blockchain and accessible indefinitely.

“Basejump is a discovery surface for the 3.2 billion people who use avatars in games and digital worlds,” Basejump CEO Matt Mason said in a statement. “Imagine a place where you can bring your characters, items, and game skins into an expanding universe of worlds that you can create and explore instantly. This dream is finally possible thanks to the AO supercomputer.

Lex Johnson, Chief Creative Officer, said in a statement: “Leveraging Action’s AI capabilities and AO’s powerful infrastructure, users will be able to bring worlds and assets to life unique and interoperable game platforms. And thanks to Arweave, these creations will last for a long time. The opportunities for new cultural and business 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 press release. “We are excited about this partnership and the opportunity to support their vision to reshape 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 provides founders and teams with the resources to identify, develop and scale product ideas from inception to mass adoption.

Action is an open, permissionless gaming substrate, enabled by AO’s horizontally scalable blockchain computing, that allows users to create interoperable gaming experiences, avatars, and gaming assets powered by AI.

AO is a hyper-parallel computer (actually, a supercomputer created by the aggregation of unused GPUs) designed to provide cooperative, trustless computing services without practical scalability limits. It combines the trust minimization benefits of blockchain networks with the speed and scalability of traditional computing environments.

Key features include support for an arbitrary number of parallel processes, unlimited compute capabilities, and seamless integration with Arweave for data storage. This architecture allows developers to create decentralized applications that are scalable, efficient and verifiable.

Origins

Formerly known as Dazzle Ship, the company released an NFT collection around 18 months ago. Based on the community that formed around metaverse-like spaces, the company decided to create Basejump, starting with interoperable game avatars, Mason said in an interview with GamesBeat.

Along with his co-founders (Brent Fitzgerald, CTO; and Lex Johnson, CCO), Mason began to imagine the next iteration of the Internet and what it would need. At some point, he hopes Web3 technology, like wallets, will work and fade into the background as players have a magical experience. Work began in November 2022. The team includes three founders and five other people.

“There are 3.2 billion people using game avatars in the world today,” he said.

But these avatars do not work when switching from one game to another. Rivals such as Ready Player Me have created their version of interoperable avatars playable across thousands of games. But Basejump has his own take on the matter and would consider an alliance with Ready Player Me, Mason said.

“Many worlds have walls between them, but more and more of them will have fewer walls,” he said. “It’s getting easier and 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 designed for that reality.”

The company started building it a year ago and partnered with Community Labs, which is the company building the technology for AO, which is tied to Arweave, which has on-chain scalable decentralized storage. AO effectively performs decentralized GPU computing to help businesses create metaverse-like experiences. Basejump raised funds from Community Labs to create Action, the substrate that can use AO. The Action Protocol will be an open, permissionless connection tool.

“AO performs on-chain parallel computing, which allows you to perform large calculations or run large processes in a single chunk. And that means you could have a complex game character in one block,” Mason said. “It’s easy to use this technology to have a record of game worlds and assets, as well as to create assets using AI. With AO you can talk and create a world. It’s like ChatGPT for gaming.

The company is working on alpha testing next week and hopes to launch in early 2025. The company doesn’t yet have an NFT behind the project, but it could eventually have one, Mason said.

“The activity will really start in 2025,” he said.