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§ Private Profile · Miami, FL, USA
Game studio building and publishing open economy games, providing a web3 development kit for creators to integrate smart contracts and wallets.
Faraway has raised $29.0M across 2 funding rounds.
Key people at Faraway.
Faraway was founded in 2021 by Alex Paley (Founder) and Dennis Zdonov (Founder).
Faraway has raised $29.0M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Faraway is a Miami-based game studio and software developer that builds open-economy web3 games and provides backend infrastructure tools for digital creators. The company develops and publishes a portfolio of blockchain-integrated titles, which includes Dookey Dash: Unclogged, Serum City, Legends of the Mara, and Mini Royale: Nations. Alongside its direct-to-consumer gaming titles, the enterprise offers a comprehensive web3 development kit designed to handle complex non-game functionality. This toolkit allows external studios to integrate smart contracts, embedded wallets, and multi-chain indexing into their own interactive gaming ecosystems. The studio has secured approximately $30 million in total venture funding from prominent institutional backers such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital, while establishing strategic partnerships with major entities like Yuga Labs. Faraway was officially established in the year 2021 by co-founders Alex Paley and Dennis Zdonov.
Key people at Faraway.
Faraway has raised $29.0M across 2 funding rounds. Most recently, it raised $21.0M Series A in November 2021.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 1, 2021 | $21M Series A | FTX Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners | Galaxy Interactive, Menlo Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Capital, Pantera Capital, Sequoia Capital, Solana Labs | Announced |
| Jul 1, 2021 | $8M Seed | — | Galaxy Interactive, General Atlantic, Menlo Ventures | Announced |
Faraway was founded in 2021 by Alex Paley (Founder) and Dennis Zdonov (Founder).
Faraway has raised $29.0M in total across 2 funding rounds.
Faraway's investors include FTX Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Galaxy Interactive, Menlo Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Jump Capital, Pantera Capital, Sequoia Capital, Solana Labs, General Atlantic.
# Faraway: Building the Infrastructure for Web3 Gaming
Faraway is a U.S.-based game development company that has constructed an interoperable gaming ecosystem designed to seamlessly integrate blockchain technology and open economies into games without requiring developers to manage the underlying complexity.[1][3] Founded in 2021, the company serves three distinct constituencies: players seeking true asset ownership and cross-game interoperability, creators looking to monetize user-generated content, and game studios wanting to integrate Web3 mechanics without technical friction.[4] At its core, Faraway solves a fundamental problem plaguing Web3 gaming—the fragmented user experience, complex wallet management, and lack of asset portability across titles—by abstracting away cryptographic complexity while preserving the economic benefits that blockchain enables.[5]
The company has evolved from a game publisher into a comprehensive platform provider, recently launching Fchain, a Layer 1 gaming blockchain built on Avalanche, and the RIFT AI platform, signaling an expansion beyond traditional gaming into autonomous agent infrastructure.[6][7] This trajectory reflects Faraway's ambition to become the operating system for player-driven economies rather than simply another game studio.
Faraway emerged in 2021 with co-founders Alex Paley and Dennis Zdonov, arriving at a critical inflection point in Web3 gaming.[4] The founding team recognized that while blockchain technology offered genuine innovations—true asset ownership, interoperability, and new economic models—the user experience remained prohibitively complex for mainstream gamers. Early Web3 games forced players to manage private keys, pay gas fees, navigate multiple wallets across different chains, and deal with clunky onchain transactions. This friction created a ceiling on adoption that no amount of game design innovation could overcome.
Rather than building another single-game title, the founders chose to construct infrastructure. Faraway began publishing games including Legends of the Mara, Dookey Dash: Unclogged, Serum City, Mini Royale: Nations, Shatterline, Villains: Robot Battle Royale, and Rebel Skies—each serving as both a revenue generator and a testbed for the interoperability layer.[5] This dual approach allowed the team to validate their platform thesis while building credibility with both players and developers.
Faraway's most immediate differentiator is its abstraction of wallet complexity. Rather than forcing users to manage separate wallets on Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon, the platform provides one-click access to a unified multichain crypto wallet through a single profile.[5] This single profile links multiple wallets across different chains to a unified gaming inventory, dramatically reducing onboarding friction while maintaining the security and transparency benefits of blockchain.
The platform enables creators to design and publish digital assets that function across multiple games within the ecosystem.[1] Creators receive automatic payments for each sale and earn royalties on secondary transactions—a revenue model that Web2 platforms have historically gatekept. This democratization of asset creation transforms players from consumers into potential creators, expanding the total addressable market for content.
Faraway abstracts away smart contract development, multi-chain indexing, embedded wallet management, and other non-game functionality, allowing developers to focus purely on game design.[8] The company provides login solutions, inventory management, and indexing infrastructure—essentially handling the entire Web3 plumbing so studios can ship games faster.
The introduction of Fchain, a Layer 1 blockchain built on Avalanche, represents a strategic move toward vertical integration.[7] By controlling the underlying blockchain, Faraway can optimize transaction finality, gas economics, and feature development specifically for gaming use cases. Fchain powers specific game mechanics like wagering systems in Rebel Skies, demonstrating how custom blockchain infrastructure can enhance gameplay rather than merely tokenize it.
The recent launch of RIFT positions Faraway at the intersection of AI agents and blockchain, creating what the company describes as a "Shopify App Store for AI Agents."[6] AI modules can perform onchain actions—becoming Fchain validators, creating NFTs, managing storefronts—and generate revenue from their activities. This expansion suggests Faraway is building toward a future where autonomous agents participate in gaming economies.
Faraway operates at the convergence of three major technology trends: the maturation of blockchain infrastructure, the mainstream adoption of AI agents, and the persistent demand for player agency in gaming.
For years, Web3 gaming remained a niche dominated by speculators and crypto enthusiasts. Faraway's approach—hiding blockchain complexity while preserving its benefits—addresses the fundamental barrier to mainstream adoption. As traditional game studios increasingly experiment with blockchain mechanics, platforms that reduce integration friction will become essential infrastructure. Faraway's timing is strategic: the industry has moved past the "why blockchain?" question and toward "how do we integrate it responsibly?"
The gaming industry has historically been siloed, with each studio controlling its own economy and assets. Faraway's interoperable ecosystem creates network effects: each new game added increases the value of the platform for existing players and creators. This mirrors how app stores became more valuable as more developers published to them. The company is essentially building the "App Store for Web3 games," a position with significant defensibility.
The RIFT platform reveals Faraway's forward-looking thesis: autonomous AI agents will become economic participants in digital ecosystems. By enabling agents to earn revenue through validator participation, NFT creation, and storefront management, Faraway is positioning itself as infrastructure for a future where human players, creators, and AI agents coexist in shared economies. This is speculative but strategically prescient.
Faraway's partnership with Avalanche and construction of Fchain on Avalanche's Subnet infrastructure demonstrates how the company is leveraging established blockchain ecosystems rather than building from scratch. This pragmatic approach reduces technical risk while maintaining optionality—RIFT tokens will eventually bridge to Hyperliquid, signaling multi-chain ambitions.
Faraway has successfully transitioned from a game publisher into a platform company, a shift that dramatically increases its addressable market and defensibility. The company's core insight—that Web3 gaming's barrier to adoption is user experience, not technology—remains sound. As traditional studios inevitably integrate blockchain mechanics, platforms that reduce friction will capture disproportionate value.
The near-term focus will likely be on expanding the creator ecosystem and growing the installed base of interoperable games. Each new title increases network effects; each new creator expands the content library. The RIFT AI platform, meanwhile, represents a longer-term bet on autonomous agents as economic participants—a thesis that could prove transformative if AI agent adoption accelerates as expected.
The key risk is execution at scale. Faraway must maintain developer experience quality while onboarding studios at speed, manage token economics to prevent speculative collapse, and navigate regulatory uncertainty around blockchain gaming. The company's success will ultimately be measured not by crypto adoption metrics but by whether mainstream gamers—those who have never owned a cryptocurrency wallet—find value in Faraway's games and ecosystem.
If Faraway executes, it could become the foundational infrastructure layer for Web3 gaming, similar to how Unity and Unreal Engine became essential tools for traditional game development. That outcome would justify the company's ambitions and explain why it has attracted backing from Sequoia Capital and partnerships with major blockchain platforms.