The Solana gaming infrastructure startup MagicBlock is making its ephemeral validator — which creates momentary Solana rollups that can process transactions quicker — open source, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.
MagicBlock was initially marketed as a platform for onchain gaming when it entered a16z’s accelerator program and started advertising earlier in the year. But when I spoke with MagicBlock co-founder and CEO Andrea Fortugno recently, he pitched me on a broader vision — that MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollups could let all developers move away from traditional web servers and make apps “unstoppable.”
MagicBlock is still used to build games. MagicBlock is the basis of Supersize’s game, which was the winner in last month’s Solana hackathon’s gaming track. Windfall was Radar’s third place gaming project. MagicBlock is a solution that allows both games to be run without losing speed.
MagicBlock achieves this by running in parallel to Solana a Solana validater that is non-voting and which can temporarily make the computing resources. “elastic” The state is verified by a security panel and settled to layer-1 before the committee. Solana’s data will be temporarily transferred to an off-chain rollup, like Optimism for Ethereum. This is done in order to accommodate some resource or time sensitive functions that are normally performed on central servers.
Fortugno stated that the newly released open-source software is under an initial license which prevents other projects from using it to launch commercial products unless they make a deal. MagicBlock also charges protocol fees.
MagicBlock is clear that despite the addition of new gaming clients they are also looking to expand into other crypto-sector. Fortugno said that the lack of success in crypto gaming has been a major factor.
Fortugno is not of the opinion that crypto gaming has been struggling. He said that ephemeral rollsups could be used in other cases. “zero effort.”
“The tech is already there, and so it would be stupid not to try to tackle the other use cases,” Fortugno said. He said SocialFi applications and perpetual futures DEXs were also looking to build on MagicBlock. It makes sense to use DeFi as an example: Zeta Markets, a Solana perps DEX is developing its own Solana layer-2 in order to compete against centralized exchange speed.
Fortugno is the name used for this term “unstoppable” This is what we talked about in our interview. Partly because it isn’t financially feasible to run everything on the blockchain, many Solana applications have sections that are managed by central entities. MagicBlock could render these apps less trustworthy if it lives up to the hype.
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