CARY – Epic Games, move over. There’s a new gaming company in town, and they’re hoping to take gaming to the next level using blockchain technology.

Enter Kronoverse, a Cary-based startup that is currently developing a platform by the same name and a 3D role-playing game called CryptoFights, which uses blockchain, or a shared ledger, to permanently record and store a player’s actions.

The uptake: a new breed of gaming where players can buy, sell and trade with other players in a real marketplace, and where game data is universally available to audit and analyze.

“We found an opening to create a higher level game currently not in the market,” Kronoverse CEO and founder Adam Kling told WRAL TechWire. “The Kronoverse platform is our grand vision to provide a new way of developing games with an easy-to-use API (application programing interface)/tool set for game makers.”

Kronoverse CEO and founder Adam Kling

The startup, under the business name Thoughts in Motion, recently raised more than $550,000 in debt from one investor, according to a recent SEC filing.

The seed round is still open and capped at $1.05 million.

“We expect to raise over $500,000 in the next several months as we already have interested parties. We are going to be finishing out CryptoFights to demonstrate the technology,” Kling said.

Founded in 2018, Kling says he got inspired to develop the game and its eSports platform from the 2011 science fiction novel, Ready Player One. It was later made into a 2018 smash-hit movie by director Steven Spielberg.

Set in dystopia 2044, the story follows protagonist Wade Watts on his search for an Easter egg in a worldwide virtual reality game.

However, if CryptoFights takes off, that future could be here sooner than imagined.

With Kronoverse, this metaverse/multiverse as portrayed in Ready Player One becomes possible “because game objects (items, environments, characters) become external to games and then can be used in multiple games.”

“Think of having one character for multiple games, items you accumulate can work in other games, new economic functions of games becomes possible, new revenue streams for developers,” Kling explained.

Of course, this is all still in development. As pointed out on its website, while crypto-based games are permitted to have wikis on Gamepedia, no trading/exchange of cryptocurrency (or in-game items holding cryptocurrency value) is permitted on the wiki platform.