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Howdy!

I have a banger tweet draft marinating about crypto gaming projects, who feel like they’re eternally suffering from “announcement of an announcement of a future launch” syndrome.

I haven’t found the right words to post it yet, but for now, here’s the latest on one of Solana’s most interesting gaming projects:

A16z funds Solana gaming outfit MagicBlock

The Solana-based gaming company MagicBlock has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding that includes an investment from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz following MagicBlock’s participation in a16z’s crypto startup accelerator earlier this year.

MagicBlock is developing a gaming engine that lets video games run fully onchain, a task that would typically be difficult due to the relatively low speed involved with using blockchains. The company solves this with a novel piece of technology it calls ephemeral rollups, which temporarily move Solana’s state to a higher-throughput rollup before settling back to the layer-1.

MagicBlock drew the online Solana world’s attention after posting a video of its game engine that drew 429,000 views on X. 

With the fresh funding, the six-person startup will aim to grow its team as well as develop its tech, which would include bringing its game engine to Solana mainnet and partnering with onchain games. 

MagicBlock was founded in September 2023 by Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco. The duo decided to create the company while building a fully onchain game and realizing how poor the user experience was, Fortugno told me in a soon-to-be-released Lightspeed podcast episode.

MagicBlock believes games running fully onchain benefit from being composable (meaning other developers can build on top of a game’s smart contracts) and not relying quite so much on third parties, but it’s hard to make a decentralized computer program run at the speed that gamers demand. 

“Players get pissed off if they have 100ms latency, so forget half a second,” Fortugno said. 

So MagicBlock is developing ephemeral rollups, which make a slightly different bet than many competitors in the blockchain gaming space. Axie Infinity-linked Ronin created an Ethereum-compatible blockchain. Immutable and Sonic both operate layer-2s. Instead, MagicBlock is trying to build technology that extends Solana’s base layer. This could avoid fragmenting liquidity or leeching fees away from the layer-1, which are common criticisms made of the layer-2 ecosystem on Ethereum.

Ephemeral rollups make use of a specialized version of Solana’s software which temporarily lets a sequencer modify accounts before settling back to Solana. The rollups initially use optimistic verification, the method favored by EVM giants Arbitrum and Optimism, for speed before verifying transactions with zero-knowledge proofs. 

As an idea, ephemeral rollups are made possible by the fact that Solana separates its state and logic, or accounts and programs, so the logic can stay put while the state moves to an ephemeral rollup.

It’s an innovative approach to game development, particularly in a crypto gaming space that so far has drawn lots of investment while delivering minimal payoff. 

But Fortugno thinks gaming is often at the frontier of technological development. He offered GPUs as an example: Before they were powering the AI boom, the circuits were used to speed up the graphics in video games.

— Jack Kubinec

Blockworks and the Solana Foundation are hosting Solana Founders Summit at Permissionless. Join a curated group of ~60 Solana industry leaders and founders for a day of workshops and off-the-record conversations.

267,890

That’s the supply of Binance’s Solana liquid staking token BNSOL five days after launch, according to SolScan data. 

That would already make BNSOL the tenth-largest Solana LST, according to a Dune dashboard. Still, it has quite a way to go before it can challenge the big five in Solana staking — Jito, Marinade, Jupiter, SolBlaze, and Sanctum, all of which have a supply of over 1 million tokens.

It’ll be interesting to watch whether Binance’s massive distribution can turn BNSOL into one of the couple largest Solana LSTs.

— Jack Kubinec

Web3 is all about the highs and lows. Depending on who you ask, the recent Redacted Airways crypto event may have set an impressive new low at 47,000 feet. The "first-ever Web3 sky event," hosted by startup Redacted, took place on a 10-hour Qatar Airways flight from Dubai to Singapore, offering networking opportunities for 250 attendees. However, some on social media have criticized the event, calling it "cringe" and questioning the chaotic atmosphere and non-stop karaoke.

Bear Take:

@RealJonahBlake posted a video of a plane filled with adult men bellowing off-key Taylor Swift lyrics, tweeting, "You accidentally booked the wrong plane on your 18-hour flight to Singapore and you just want a few hours of sleep before a crypto conference." For some, the disconnect between crypto and the event was obvious. @33b345 remarked, "250 non-crypto people. This is a normie Halloween party, with a crypto theme."

@DancingEddie_ lamented, "The culture in some ways has definitely, definitely devolved. Just take a normal flight guys damn." @stinkkoala added, "If staff didn’t think crypto was cringe before, they do now." Others admitted feeling secondhand anxiety just watching the videos, such as @studiostassi who said, "This is my personal nightmare." Meanwhile, @nassyweazy expressed relief, saying, "Thank god I dodged this," and @TrevElViz joked, "Pretty sure this is the first time flight attendants have actually prayed for turbulence." @notmaitham offered, "There is a non-zero chance I would have to jump out of the plane. No parachute, raw" and @tomaxwell speculated, "The smell in there could probably kill the pilots."

The importance of personal privacy was also highlighted by many long-time crypto users, such as @SamyXBTC who said, "Real crypto people don't even go to events. You do like Satoshi did and never doxx yourself."

Bull take:

Despite the critics, many attendees and supporters saw the sky-high event as an exciting and unique opportunity to network and enjoy the company of like-minded individuals. @TheCryptoNexus found the event a welcome break from the usual monotony of long-haul flights, saying, "Everyone hating on this, but it looks like a way more fun flight than the normal flight experience of sitting and staring at an iPad the entire time."

@MoonFue1 noted the deeper value of the experience, tweeting, "Let me tell you what was perhaps the most meaningful aspect of the flight... the second hand connections being made as a result… From three degrees of separation to one, from some of the most connected people in the space. Literally overnight. God-tier value add."

@gazza_jenks shared, "Good times were had, people partied, connected and got pumped up for what promises to be an epic week in Singapore. Hats off to @redactedcoin for pulling this off—I was skeptical, but I’m glad to have been a part of this." The overall sentiment from these supporters was that, while unconventional, the event succeeded in bringing the Web3 community together in a way that no one had experienced before.

And in the end, does it even matter if something is labeled as "cringe" if it succeeds in attracting attention, gets people talking, and seems to have been a good experience for those who actually paid to be part of it? Whether you love or hate the spectacle, it certainly left its mark.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Andrea Fortugno, co-founder and CEO of MagicBlock: