Bazooka Tango announced the open beta for Shardbound, a fantasy trading card game with Web3 rewards.

The company said it is making Shardbound available to players worldwide on Steam and the Epic Games Store. This release brings exclusive rewards to over 100,000 pre-registered players, including a unique set of playable cards: 1 Rare, 1 Epic, and 1 Legendary—giving players the upper hand in building their decks and dominating the battlefield, the company said.

In addition to the card distribution, Shardbound is also launching its partnership with Immutable’s Main Quest, the largest Web3 gaming rewards program. Players who complete quests can earn Gems, redeemable for IMX tokens, offering even more opportunities to enhance their game experience.

“Shardbound’s open beta is a huge moment for us, and for the players who’ve been waiting to get in on the action,” said Bo Daly, cofounder of Bazooka Tango, in a statement. “We’ve always believed in creating games that are fun to play but also have that extra depth for those who want to dig in. This is just the start of what we have planned, and I can’t wait to see how players take the game and make it their own.”

Stephan Sherman, Co-founder of Bazooka Tango, said in a statement, “Look, we didn’t just want to make another card game. As we said during development, ‘Every card, a story’, and I honestly hope players will fall in love with the characters and sprawling lore we’ve hand crafted for the world of Shardbound.”

The company said more than 100,000 pre-registered players will receive a set of 1 Rare, 1 Epic, and 1 Legendary card, helping them kickstart their journey and fine-tune their strategies. The cards will be distributed through players’ Immutable Passport wallets or as email redemption codes.

Web3 rewards

As part of the open beta, player who complete in-game quests can earn 100 Gems, which are redeemable for IMX.

Players can play the game without Web3. But those who connect their wallets and participate in the open beta will be eligible for multiple non-fungible token (NFT) upgrades. These upgrades will be based on participation in specific time windows. Players who miss one window will not be eligible for previous upgrades. The first upgrade window is October 9 to October 16, and the other upgrades run through November 6.

Bazooka Tango is launching events. Players can dive into PvP action with the “Shard and Shield” event, where players can complete missions for exclusive rewards. Plus, new players can jump into the challenge with rewards for consecutive days played, as well as special opportunities to expand their collections through faction-based events. There are also daily login challenges, faction showdowns and starter packs.

The synthetic biology and precision fermentation space is a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity these days. But it’s not every day you come across a startup that’s using genetic engineering to produce natural rubber — a substance that’s challenging to reproduce in a lab because of how long its polymer is.

Paris-based baCta has a proof of concept up and running that uses engineered bacteria (E.coli) to yield natural rubber in vitro. The startup says its method, which relies upon a renewable feedstock — currently it’s using glucose but is aiming to diversify into acetate and carbon — is carbon neutral.

The startup has just bagged €3.3 million (around $3.6 million at current exchange rates) so it can get to work on its next challenge: figuring out how to industrialize its lab-based process and move from producing milligrams of raw material so far into the far greater quantities necessary for other companies to use its rubber to make their own products.

Natural rubber not grown on trees

Around half the world’s rubber is synthetic (i.e. derived from petroleum); the other half (natural rubber) is harvested from the latex-laden sap of Hevea trees. Neither route is great from a sustainability point of view. Though natural rubber might sound more environmentally friendly, it can lead to deforestation if land is cleared to make way for Hevea plantations.

At the same time, with the advent of emissions reporting regulations and the like, manufacturers in Europe and elsewhere are under pressure to find ways to reduce their carbon footprints. So if a raw material’s supply can be greener, and the product is competitively priced, there should be a clear incentive to switch to a bio-engineered version of natural rubber.

BaCta CEO and founder Mathieu Nohet sounds confident that the startup, which was only founded in January 2024, will be able to scale up production of its biosynthesized natural rubber.

He also thinks the approach it’s taken — which involves “synthetic AI enzyme technology that basically lifts scientific barriers and enables polymerization of rubber inside bacteria,” as he explains it — will allow it to hit a price-point that’s competitive versus the conventional commodity, while offering major reductions in CO2 emissions.

“Having this polymerization mechanism inside the cell enables us to be much more efficient in terms of yield and, ultimately, in terms of cost per kilogram, which means that if we’re able to pull off the mixotrophic approach [i.e. feedstock diversification], we’ll actually be competitive with the commodity at the price that is today.”

“We’re testing acetate [as a feedstock] and also trying to fix carbon directly inside the cell to increase yield, decrease cost and carbon impact. [Natural rubber] has a huge carbon impact, so we could actually remove hundreds of millions of tons of CO2 from the atmosphere if we [are] successful.”

Initially, baCta’s go-to-market strategy entails targeting the material at luxury fashion/apparel brands — so for use-cases like premium shoes, bags, etc. — which don’t need large quantities of raw material. It would then seek to expand out to more industrial-style use cases (rubber parts for vibration damping in machinery, for example) once it’s stepped up production.

“The goal is to scale it up,” he says. “First try it in a fermenter, get it out of the lab, basically, and then to a pilot scale. So, let’s say, 100 to 200 liters cultures, so that we can start delivering bigger batches to our potential customers.”

The startup is hoping to reach pilot scale in 18 months, per Nohet. “Then we would raise another round to reach pre-industrial scale,” he says.

BaCta’s pre-seed round is led by OVNI Capital, with participation from another.vc, Kima Ventures, Sharpstone Capital, and “prominent” business angels, including Thibaud Elziere and members of the Hexa team, as well as Nicolas Morin, co-founder of Gourmey.

Since the startup’s natural rubber is produced through genetic engineering, Nohet confirms they are able to remove specific proteins in the tree sap that can trigger allergies. This means the biosynthesized natural rubber could have an added benefit in that it could be marketed as hypoallergenic.

Down the line, the startup has plans to move beyond rubber production, too: It wants to apply the approach to deliver carbon neutral production of isoprenoids — a family of chemical compounds derived from a monomer of the rubber polymer — that have many uses in areas like industrial and pharmaceutical production.

But the company is sticking with natural rubber for starters.

“Rubber has this advantage where many, many people use it for different usage,” he notes. “So we can actually have a sequential go-to-market, where we start with a very high-end customers, and then move towards more mass market. Plus it’s a very, common, famous, understandable product. So we think it’s easier to get people behind the mission with a first product that everybody knows.”

Amazon is adding Apple TV Plus to Prime Video, a move that could help bolster the iPhone maker’s languishing streaming service. Apple TV Plus will be available on Prime Video in the US later this month as a $9.99 monthly add-on — the same you’d otherwise pay directly to Apple. The difference now is that Apple TV Plus is being promoted directly to Amazon’s massive video subscriber base.

“What we offer channel partners is hundreds of millions of subscribers around the world,” said Prime Video head Mike Hopkins at Bloomberg’s Screentime conference. “We see a lot more engagement, we’re able to get subscribers for those businesses at a really attractive rate.” Amazon takes a cut of the revenue from streaming subscriptions purchased on its video platform, but the specific terms have not been disclosed.

While Apple TV Plus has been praised for its roster of shows like Severance, Ted Lasso, and Foundation, the service has struggled to gain ground against Prime Video, Netflix, Max, Disney Plus, and Hulu — currently the five most subscribed streaming platforms in the US, respectively. Paramount Plus overtook the service in market share last quarter according to the JustWatch streaming guide, and market research firm Antenna reports that Apple TV Plus has some of the highest subscription cancellation rates among streaming providers.

Having Apple TV Plus available within Prime Video isn’t quite the same as bundled deals like Comcast’s all-in-one Netflix, Peacock, and Apple TV Plus offerings, but the goal is the same — to attract more customers and reduce cancellation rates as audiences grow weary of managing an ever-increasing number of subscriptions and apps.

For Amazon, Apple TV Plus joins over 100 streaming service add-ons already available through Prime Video Channels. It’s all part of the company’s plan to become a global “first-stop entertainment hub” according to Hopkins, a goal that Apple once had for Apple TV.