LOS ANGELES - Marylandian -- Yee-Haw Monster Trucks, a gaming studio building a new kind of virtual world built and governed by players, today announces its $3.3 million seed round. The round was led by 1kx, with participation from Shima Capital, Hashed, Matchbox DAO, Ready Player DAO, and several angel investors.

While the MMO gaming landscape has experienced stagnation, the Yee-Haw Monster Trucks team believes that one of the most compelling use cases for blockchains in gaming is addressing the longstanding problems faced by persistent worlds since their inception in the 1980s. Unlike both traditional games and most blockchain games to date, The Citadel will host all of its game state, assets, and logic directly on blockchain smart contracts instead of conventional server-based architecture. For the first time in the history of virtual worlds, this will enable players to truly own, build, and govern the world they inhabit without permission from its creators.

In late 2021, a group of bitter virtual world enthusiasts, Jack Stoops, Max Sallinger, Martino Olmo Fabro, Austin Henderson, Connor Skific, and Will Sanford, began working on The Citadel, a fully on-chain and decentralized game built on the Ethereum blockchain. When they first started out, the idea of building a full game – let alone a persistent world – entirely on the blockchain was relatively unheard of. With The Citadel, Yee-Haw Monster Trucks aims to redefine what an MMO can be while simultaneously demonstrating the true potential of decentralized technology for game worlds.

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"This Citadel was born out of the incredible experiences we've had in other worlds," said Will Sanford, a co-founder of Yee-Haw Monster Trucks.  "As well as all the ways those experiences were diminished by decisions we as players had no say over. We wanted to make the kind of world we wanted to experience ourselves. We believe we are still in the early era of not only blockchain gaming, but virtual worlds as a unique medium."

"Our motivation is not to merely port over designs we already know how to build to the blockchain with minor tweaks, but to build a world that never could have existed without it. And, ultimately, we believe much of this discovery will be the result of empowering passionate players we haven't met yet to create things we could never imagine."

"The Citadel is the most ambitious project we've seen in the autonomous worlds ecosystem to date," said Peter 'pet3rpan', Partner at 1kx.  "The team is deeply focused on re-imagining the possibilities of virtual worlds by pushing the capabilities of what is possible with a blockchain today in a way we haven't seen before. At 1kx we're extremely proud to partner with such a capable and thoughtful team."

"We believe The Citadel will be one of the most innovative on-chain games to hit the market and will truly unlock the player-owned gaming economy," said Yida Gao, Founder and Managing General Partner at Shima Capital. "Its community of players and creators will be able to build mods from the core elements of The Citadel's game design, driving operational costs down and sustaining gameplay beyond the typically short shelf life of games today."

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"The Citadel is the collective effort of a team who fully understands the merits of blockchain technology for gaming and modding," said Jun Park, an investor at HASHED. "HASHED believes that the team can transform their on-chain experimentation into Autonomous Worlds in the most discreet and aggressive manner, eventually serving the true purpose of decentralized ownership, autonomy, governance and content creation."

Yee-Haw Monster Trucks plans to launch a public playtest for The Citadel in the near future, with a big update coming next week announcing more details. To stay up to date, follow The Citadel on Twitter at twitter.com/0xCitadel or join the Discord server at discord.gg/thecitadel.

Yee-Haw Monster Trucks is also actively hiring passionate and talented artists and engineers who love to build player-driven worlds, enquire at: jobs@yeehawmonstertrucks.com

About The Citadel

The Citadel is an upcoming sci-fi virtual world built entirely on the Ethereum blockchain. It aims to create an independent world for and by its community of players. With no centralized servers to keep alive, it will have the potential to persist as long as the Ethereum network itself. Players will be able to contribute directly to the development and governance of the world via its decentralized and fully open source architecture.

About Yee-haw Monster Trucks

Formally incorporated in 2023 by a team working together since 2021, Yee-Haw Monster Trucks is a game studio dedicated to building The Citadel, a new type of decentralized virtual world. The six original co-founders came together in 2021, united by a shared passion for hardcore sandbox worlds like Ultima Online and EVE Online. The studio plans to launch The Citadel in 2024.