ArenaX Labs has closed a $5 million seed capital round led by Paradigm Capital with participation from Framework Ventures. The funding will help accelerate the development of AI Arena, a player-versus-player fighting game where characters are controlled by artificial intelligence (AI). The game is based on the Ethereum blockchain.
AI Arena players own their own fighters, which include typical attributes such as power, speed, and accuracy that can be purchased with non-fungible tokens (NFT). The fighters are also equipped with an artificial neural network that enables them to act autonomously.
"You have this autonomous AI that can compete with other autonomous AI around the world. The goal is to train [the fighter] to get better and better so you can earn more on our play-to-earn platform," ArenaX founder and CEO Brandon Da Silva said in an interview with CoinDesk.
The AI fighters are trained either through imitation learning, where the player takes control and "teaches" the AI character how to react to a variety of circumstances, or through self-play, where the AI character is let loose to train on its own.
The play-to-earn aspect of AI Arena involves ranked battles, where the number of tokens a player receives depends on their ranked position. Da Silva says ArenaX plans to add a betting battle mode at a later date, where players can bet against their opponent.
ArenaX expects to launch AI Arena late in the first quarter of 2022 or early in the second quarter, Da Silva told CoinDesk.
"We love the team and think the concept of AI characters as collectibles is brilliant. We're excited to see how cryptocurrencies and game mechanics can help drive innovation and reward artificial intelligence researchers," Dan Robinson, head of research at Paradigm Capital, told CoinDesk in a statement.