We’re thrilled to begin unveiling some of our plans for the upcoming Early Alpha release of Cambria and share some exciting updates. In this blog post, we'll cover:

• The Cambria Journey ⏪
• Our Founder Collection 🥇
• Roadmap for Q4 🕹️

The Journey

When we first started development on Cambria in the fall of 2022, our goal was simple - build "crypto Runescape" and bring the freedom and high-stakes drama of crypto to a MMORPG. We shipped our first sandbox playground environment 3 months later to what was then a tiny community of NFT enthusiasts - a demo that got us our first viral tweet on X.

Realizing that we'd struck a nerve with a niche but passionate group of degens that grew up on Runescape, we began the long (and at the time seemingly unrealistic!) journey of building out a crypto-native MMO from the ground up.

What followed was our first year of development - building our own custom engine for a browser-native game with onchain state sync as a first class citizen, scalable to hundreds of thousands of players interacting in a persistent world, with a hyper-financialized, player-driven economy designed around real $ stakes.

Developing an MMO is no easy feat! Much less one designed around crypto 🤣. We started kicking the tires pretty early on the core engine by shipping a minigame called Duel Arena. The arena is a 1v1 high-stakes social experience blew up beyond our expectations, racking up a staggering 1.5 million duels ⚔️, all escrowed 100% onchain.

Scrambling to handle the $100m+ in game volume that followed (with no major security incidents) was our trial by fire. We had to scaffold up an incredible amount of internal tooling and systems to handle the liveops / access control & auditing / eco monitoring / data persistence etc. required to make it all work.

We've also invested heavily on the frontend & graphics engineering to make the game run smoothly across all devices, with minimal loading times. Combined with our suite of smart contracts and internal libraries, we are now able to rapidly roll out new onchain features that are chain agnostic and broadly extensible.

Early Alpha

More than a year of behind-the-scenes development later - we are finally here ✨.

The Gold Rush Early Alpha marks the first (close-to-production) iteration of the full vision for Cambria - an experimental MMO with real stakes and onchain significance, a game where skilling, PvP, PvE, trading, politics, banditry, and exploration all have their place across a complex digital economy driven by risk & reward.

We've playtested Gold Rush extensively over the past 9 months, each time gaining an incredible set of new insights on how an crypto MMO could actually work. These weekend events have taken on a life of their own, with an incredibly passionate community of hardcore gamers that have been willing to YOLO real ETH ($39k USD last time) on a very early and ugly builds, providing invaluable ideas & feedback on both the macro & micro elements of gameplay along the way.

Although still early, we’ve reached a point where we feel confident in the direction we’re heading. This release is the beginning of a fully working game that we believe will redefine the genre over the coming years, with deep gameplay combined with novel, PvP-based tokenomics.

The Founder Collection

The Founder Collection has been in the works since the inception of Cambria, and we're incredibly excited to kick this off (finally!). Having started development a bit later than the rest (late 2022), we had the benefit of hindsight from observing the NFT launches of other games - insights that made us decide early on to wait until we had something actually innovative and exciting to scale up alongside a collection. This way, we could ensure that any speculative hype would align with our go-to-market strategy for Early Alpha.

To support this strategy, we decided to raise a private Seed Round with funds that play long-term games, are genuinely thoughtful about their crypto gaming theses, and are well connected in the space - BITKRAFT (Discord, Epic Games, CCP Games) and 1kx (Playmint, Pudgy Penguins, Ronin). Now that we're finally here, we're incredibly excited to have their support moving into Early Alpha and our upcoming token.

What is the Founder Collection?

The Founder Collection is Cambria’s first and most exclusive NFT offering and will be minted on the Ethereum blockchain (L1). Holders of the Founder NFT will form the core of our community, serving as the earliest supporters, architects, and elder statesmen of New Cambria.

On the art side, we’ve chosen the Symbols of Power to represent different aspects of the Founder’s role in New Cambria:

• The Baton: A symbol of royal authority, conferring unique rights such as reduced fees, landed property, and the prestigious "Ser" in-game title.
• The Scroll: A dynamic document that tracks each Founder’s contributions to Cambria development, with benefits that scale with its progression system.
• Falconry: A companion with a storied history, assisting with hunting, tracking, and resource gathering. The Falcon will gain new abilities over time.
• Founders’ Hall: A private hub in-game for strategizing, socializing, and sharing knowledge. Exclusive amenities like restoration altars and stalls.

Most importantly, Founders will enjoy first access to all future Cambria opportunities, including mints, early access events, and an exclusive allocation in our airdrop.

Powering all of this is v1.0 of a new Loyalty system tied with our collections (and eventually all aspects of the game). This system will aggregate a variety of data points to compute a Loyalty Score and track unique designations like "Founding Minter" with specialized progression tiers. Ahead of our Token, we want to be able to drill down in granular detail to identify our most loyal holders and members that have contributed the most to network value.

Distribution

With the Founder Collection, we're committed to building a high quality base of holders, a small group of die-hard fans that will drive the success of Cambria over the next few years. This majority of this initial group will be pre-selected from our current community. Here's how we're allocating access to the mint:

Phase 1: Guaranteed Mint

• Free Mint
  • Qualification:
    • Architects
• Architect Role (2022 Playtesters that provided the earliest Feedback)
• AND 5,000 Essence Points*
• Party Hat Holders
  • Snapshot of Party Hat holders (in-game rare)
• Reduced Price (0.05E)
  • Qualification:
• Architects
  • Architect Role, with less than 5,000 Essence Points*
• Patrons
  • Accumulated over 25,000 Essence Points*
• Full Price (0.1E)
  • Friends of Cambria
    • Select group of WL'ed individuals (WIP)

*Essence Points from any Season qualify. Gold Rush Playtest EP = 0.465 EP. This conversion is not final or binding for future airdrops.

Phase 2: Non-Guaranteed (FCFS) Mint

• Full Price (0.1E)
  • Any Essence Points holders
  • Whitelisted communities (announcement pending)

Our Website

Our new website is now live, with the full details on the Founder Collection and much more! This site will also be the home for our updated Lobby + Game pages.

Check it out here - cambria.gg

Looking Ahead: Q4 2024

As we approach the next few months, here’s what you can expect:

• Early Alpha will launch in late October for a full 2-week season.
• ****** on *********
• ???

As always, stay tuned.