Most game developers do not want to become blockchain engineers, and they should not have to. Stardust, founded in 2018 in Palo Alto by Canaan Linder, is the infrastructure layer that lets them avoid it. Through a clean, developer-first API, Stardust offers Wallets-as-a-Service, NFT minting and management, and on-chain rewards, so studios can integrate digital ownership into their games without rebuilding wallet UX, custody, or contract tooling from scratch.

The product insight is that the bottleneck for Web3 gaming was never player demand, it was developer time. Every studio that experimented with NFTs or in-game wallets in the last cycle ended up writing the same plumbing: key management, gas abstraction, secondary marketplaces, account recovery. Stardust packages all of it as infrastructure, the same way Stripe packaged payments or Twilio packaged messaging, and lets gameplay teams stay focused on gameplay.

For Fulgur, the strategic logic is direct. We want a healthy, plural ecosystem of Bitcoin and Lightning gaming experiences, and that requires picks-and-shovels infrastructure that meets developers where they are. Stardust is exactly that layer: a neutral, well-engineered backend that drops the integration cost of Web3 features by orders of magnitude, opening the door for studios who would otherwise stay on the sidelines.

We partnered with Stardust in 2020, when the wallets-as-a-service category was barely a thesis. Canaan and the team have spent the years since turning that early bet into a serious developer platform. As gaming continues its slow, real convergence with on-chain economies, the studios that ship fastest will be the ones standing on infrastructure like this.