Mutant Hounds Race onto Soneium as Superstake Launches Hound

In Brief:

• According to Soneium, the Mutant Cartel universe has landed on its network via Hound, a racing game powered by Superstake.
• Racing earns players up to 100 STAR Points that count toward Startale’s Summer Fiesta campaign.
• This marks at least the third NFT brand Superstake has built a risk game around on Soneium, following Cool Cats and Lazy Lions.

Mutant Cartel has picked up a Soneium game. Soneium said the Mutant Hounds IP is coming to the Sony-backed layer 2 via Hound, a racing title constructed on Superstake. The setup is simple: choose a hound, then enter a race.

“Pick your hound, hit the track, and jump into the game,” Soneium said in the post announcing the launch.

Time spent in the game accumulates as much as 100 STAR Points toward Summer Fiesta, the group of Mini App campaigns run by Startale. Every campaign in the batch carries a ceiling of 170 STAR Points. The run started Aug. 13 and continues through September.

In a recap of Startale’s 23rd community call, the game appeared under the name Hound Racing among September’s Summer Fiesta additions, listed next to LasMeta and Squadletics, with rewards that include a PlayStation 5.

Inside the Startale App, STAR Points function as an activity ledger. Minting or holding USDSC, finishing in-app tasks and using dapps all generate them. Startale has indicated the points will feed into eligibility for an airdrop down the line. So far, there is no token.

Superstake’s NFT playbook

Several chains host Superstake’s risk games, Soneium and ApeChain among them. Little varies between titles: wager ETH, provably fair mechanics, and the option to cash out whenever you like to secure winnings or press on for a larger multiplier.

Arriving after Hound’s predecessors — Cool Cats Claw Machine and Lazy Penalty — the latter being the Lazy Lions title in which a player selects one of five corners while the keeper defends the same five.

On the penalty game with Startale and Superstake, Lazy Lions reported volume topping $50,000 in less than a week. Accompanying that stretch was a campaign handing out two Lazy Lions NFTs, upward of $1,500 in prizes and extra STAR rewards.

Who’s behind the chain

An OP Stack rollup, Soneium comes from Sony Block Solutions Labs — the joint venture pairing Sony Group Corporation with Startale Group. The chain was unveiled in August 2024 and reached mainnet in January, following a four-month testing window that attracted over 14 million users and handled 50 million transactions. Blocks come every two seconds.

Funding for Startale totals $70 million, with Sony Innovation Fund, SBI Holdings, Samsung Next and UOB Venture among its backers. The firm is also the issuer of Startale USD, or USDSC, a stablecoin it intends to become the network’s default dollar for payments and rewards.

The hounds

A deflationary collection of 10,000 pieces from Novel Labs, Mutant Hounds introduced the first characters of Mutant Cartel World. The Cartel operates as an independent narrative universe designed to broaden Yuga Labs’ MAYC ecosystem while sitting outside Yuga itself. Its mint happened in two stages, with 10,000 Mutant Hound Collars burned to create the hounds.

The collection sold out ahead of public sale in December 2022 and produced over 20,000 ETH — about $40 million — in secondary sales during the first half of 2023.

Fusion is where the collection stands now. Hounds are burned by holders in exchange for one of four materials: Hound Organs, Bottled Soul, Hacked DNA and Dark Serum. A cap of 1,250 applies to each, totaling 5,000, alongside no more than 328 VIP materials set aside for VIP Mutant Cartel Oath holders. Pairing a material with a MAYC, a BAYC or an Oath yields an unrevealed Fused Hound.

Serum City is another Novel Labs project, made with Faraway — a city builder powered by ApeCoin and the first game beyond Yuga to adopt the token.

On its own website, Superstake sums itself up in four words: “The Roblox of Tokens.”