The team behind blockchain RPG Aria has successfully raised $5m in their latest funding round, with finances secured from a number of well-known backers in the on-chain gaming space to help bring next-gen web3 gaming with AAA quality to the masses across the world.

Funding Round Details

The $5,000,000 funding round was lead by web3-focused investor Folius Ventures, crypto investment firm The Spartan Group, and the Beam Foundation, the creators of the Beam network who help in propelling innovation across their sovereign L1 chain. Alongside these 3 backers, blockchain gaming & metaverse investor Animoca Brands and crypto investor Galaxy Interactive were also named among the list of participants, which may potentially consist of more unnamed supporters as well. All of the named backers took part in last year’s seed round.

While specific details on how the funds will exactly be used were not revealed, the announcement states that this new funding milestone further powers the team’s goal of bringing “next-gen Web3 gaming with AAA-quality experiences to players worldwide.” It’s certainly a big boost that will hopefully help the team deliver a quality blockchain-powered RPG for both web3 and web2 gamers to enjoy while giving players the option to own their assets and earn various rewards along the way.

Back in March 2024, the studio announced key angel investors for their seed round, among which were gainzy (@gainzy222), Beanie (@beaniemaxi), tuba (@0xtuba) and many more. This announcement was then followed up in May of that same year with a list of investors for their seed round, which included Merit Circle (now Beam), Big Brain Holdings, LiquidX, and more.

What Is Aria?

Aria is a scalable RPG and web3 gaming ecosystem that was previously known as Manasis Refrain until late 2022, when it underwent a rebrand and a pivot to global expansion instead of solely focusing on the Japanese market.

The core game will be an open-world third-person action RPG focused on delivering hardcore blockchain-backed gaming across high-end mobile devices on both Android and iOS. It was initially planned to launch in Q2 2025, according to the roadmap in the whitepaper, but that never happened, and there doesn’t seem to be a new release timeframe nor an updated roadmap at the time of writing. What did happen however were 2 closed beta tests, one of which featured 10k testers, while the other saw decent activity of more than 5k+ daily active players on average, which they claim is “one of the highest retention rates in crypto we've ever seen!” Some other highlights achieved since 2024 include 1 million NFT registrations on BNB Chain, tens of thousands of NFT holders and in-game transactions through TON-powered NFT marketplace Getgems, and the onboarding of over 3 million casual gamers on the ecosystem’s Telegram bot, where players have been able to stake NFTs for a limited time to earn Aria Credits, which are airdrop points determining allocation of the upcoming $ARIA token. Eventually, players will be able to enjoy 3 different Telegram mini-games: Compass, Totebot, and IO.

Aria’s Upcoming Telegram Mini-Games

Compass will be a casual idle game in which players will collect Crystals, while Totebot is set to be a puzzle-driven strategy game focused on completing inventory management challenges to collect Equipment. IO will be a duel-based online strategy game in which players compete to earn Characters. All 3 mini-games will be playable on Telegram, with Crystals, Equipment, and Characters likely all set to be NFTs that are interoperable with the ecosystem’s flagship mobile RPG. This means that the NFT rewards won throughout these mini-games will be usable in-game in the Aria RPG as core game assets. It’s up to you as to whether you want to improve your character build with these on-chain assets, or sell them to other players once the game goes live.

No launch dates for these mini-games are available as of writing, with one of the latest official X posts that cover the project’s highlights mentioning that the team is now focused on developing ARIA Character AI Agents in order to deliver "deeper immersion & personality.” The same post also teased that something “big” is coming soon, though that may have been referring to the new funding round.

What Is the $ARIA Token?

The core game is set to be powered by $ARIA, the upcoming governance token that will give gamers the ability to vote on in-game activities they’d like to see added next. According to the whitepaper, the total supply for $ARIA will be 1 billion, with 51% of it set to be reserved for the community and airdrop allocations, while the team gets 15% that is fully locked for 6 months from TGE, after which there is linear vesting for 36 months. Airdrops also seem to come with vesting and are set to gradually unlock based on the player’s in-game activity regarding certain actions such as task completion and in-game purchases. However, none of this info might be relevant at present, so I won’t be mentioning the rest of the tokenomics. In the performance report for the second closed beta test, the team mentioned unclear tokenomics as being one of the complaints received throughout the playtest. In that X post from July 18, they stated that a reveal of the most updated tokenomics is coming soon. For now, that reveal doesn’t seem to have happened, but hopefully we’ll find out more official details at some point throughout this August.

In the meantime, if you’re looking forward to playing an anime-styled mobile RPG with hardcore gameplay, then be sure to join Aria’s Telegram channels and official Discord server to stay up to date on the latest developments on their mini-games, AI agents, and flagship web3 title.