Planetarium is a South Korean blockchain technology company that operates at the intersection of game development and decentralized infrastructure. The company is best known for creating Nine Chronicles, a fully open-source, decentralized role-playing game built on its own blockchain framework, Libplanet. Beyond game development, Planetarium also participates in the broader Web3 ecosystem as a corporate investor, backing early-stage projects aligned with its vision of player-owned, permissionless gaming worlds.
The company was established in South Korea around 2018–2019 and has since grown into one of the more technically distinctive blockchain game studios in Asia. Rather than building on existing L1 or L2 networks, Planetarium developed Libplanet as a peer-to-peer game networking library that lets games run without central servers. Nine Chronicles launched in open alpha in 2021 and remains one of the few live blockchain games where the entire codebase – including the game client – is open-source. Public information on total assets under management or a formal venture fund structure is limited; Planetarium's investment activity appears to flow from its corporate balance sheet rather than a dedicated fund vehicle.
Notable investments
- Planetarium's lead investment and primary portfolio anchor is Nine Chronicles itself – the flagship project around which the company's ecosystem strategy is built.
- The company has made a small number of additional strategic bets (five portfolio companies per available data), focused on blockchain gaming infrastructure and open-source tooling. Specific third-party investment names are not confirmed in public filings or press releases as of mid-2026.
Team
Public information about Planetarium's founding team and managing partners is limited in English-language sources. The company is headquartered in Seoul and has engineering and product teams distributed across South Korea. Leadership backgrounds skew toward game development and distributed systems engineering rather than traditional finance.
Recent activity
In 2024 and into 2025, Planetarium focused on expanding the Nine Chronicles ecosystem, including developer grants and community-run forks of the game. The company has engaged with the broader Libplanet open-source community to position its technology stack as infrastructure for other studios building on-chain games. No major new external investments were announced publicly during this period.
Planetarium occupies a niche but technically credible position in the Web3 gaming space. With a small external portfolio and a concentrated bet on its own IP, its investment thesis is essentially a proof-of-concept strategy: demonstrate that fully decentralized games can work, then back adjacent projects that extend that vision. Whether that approach scales beyond a tight ecosystem remains to be seen. More details on its investment arm may emerge as the Nine Chronicles network grows and the company formalizes its grant or co-investment programs.
