The developer of the blockchain gaming platform Chimaera, Typhon Ltd., today announced that the platform has started a public token presale.

This public portion follows a private presale, which raised an estimated $1.5 million or 155 bitcoins. The public presale began early today at midnight PDT.

Token crowdsales are increasingly popular for startups seeking to raise capital to launch their platforms. As part of their nature, all blockchains run on an underlying token, known as a cryptocurrency, and this currency is used to initiate transactions on that blockchain. Owners of these tokens then can use the blockchain, so by using a crowdsale a blockchain platform not only raises capital but seeds its own audience of users with access tokens.

In the case of the Chimaera blockchain, the token of note is the CHI. With CHI, game developers can record transactions on the blockchain, which in turn will be cryptographically embedded along with the transactions of many other developers, providing a tamperproof record of events, trades, game actions and other data.

The Chimaera distributed ledger blockchain is designed to help manage increasingly complex game worlds and game participation models. It does this by helping to secure the ownership, sharing and trading of virtual assets by tracking transactions on its blockchain.

The platform can also track turn-based gaming by recording moves completed by players into its blockchain and verify that those moves follow the rules. For example, a game of chess could be recorded, move-for-move, in the blockchain.

To do this, Chimaera provides a software development kit and application programming interface for developers to access a suite of tools using what the company calls a “state-of-the-art infrastructure” to allow the rapid development of games that can use the blockchain.

Chimaera founder Andrew Colosimo said that the platform would “ensure safe trading and near infinite scalability.” Like most other blockchain infrastructure platforms for gaming, it is designed to be as efficient and fast as possible while providing a foundation for in-game economies, ways for developers to get paid and provide provably fair gameplay for players.

Blockchain technology developed for gaming and virtual worlds has been expanding over the past few years.

Most prominently right now, the Ethereum-based virtual kitten and breeding game CryptoKitties will become its own company after raising $12 million in funding. Game developer Unity Technologies SF partnered with GameCredits Inc. to develop a blockchain-based digital asset for gaming, and Crytek GmbH and Crycash announced a team up to launch their own digital currency.

Jon “Neverdie” Jacobs of Neverdie Studios launched two blockchain-based currencies, Teleport Tokens and Neverdie Coins, to build a virtual game blockchain that could be used by people to build virtual worlds, trade items and make money.

On the infrastructure side, Walt Disney Co. incubated startup Dragonchain Inc. spun off as its own company and launched its own blockchain software for gaming companies looking to build blockchain capability into their own games.

Chimaera’s blockchain looks to change how blockchains are used in gaming solutions by providing a way for game developers to create “game groups” each of whom get their own space on the blockchain in order to operate. This is done by providing private game channels where rules are set at the beginning of a match, transactions are recorded into a private match record to maintain an anti-cheat system, and the final transaction goes onto the main blockchain in order to announce a winner and distribute a reward.

This is ideal for esports or tournament-style digital gaming where a reward pool is set at the beginning of a match, rules are put in place, moves are made and finally a winner is recorded.

Chimaera claims that its system is extremely scalable. Since each match relies only on its own private gaming channel to record its own internal state between players and to provide a reliable tamperproof anticheating system, by recording actions and checking them against the rules, the entire chain is not bogged down by every move made in every game across the entire system.

“Game channels are massively scalable,” a Chimaera spokesperson said on the company’s Medium blog. “One transaction per game accrues minimal bloat, even at the scale of millions of active players. On a personal scale, game channels provide a much more storage-efficient solution, as players must only sync their Chimaera client with the specific off-chain game channels they choose to participate in.”

Although the most obvious use of this sort of system is for turn-based games such as card games and turn-based strategy, Chimaera could also be used for extremely popular Massively Online Battle Arenas. Extremely popular MOBAs include League of Legends from Riot Games Inc. and Dota 2 from Valve Corp.

Using Chimaera’s infrastructure, a MOBA could operate using what the company calls a Decentralized Autonomous Universe, a specialized virtual world that is broken up into different segments each recording and controlling its own separate off-chain channel. Players then interact with one another in their own shard and the other distributed shards, then synchronize when activities cross borders.

With this model, Chimaera believes that it has a unique and different approach to how a blockchain platform could be incorporated into video games. And that it’s tamperproof nature and transactional recording capability could enable highly scalable game experiences for players.

Image: Chimaera