OP Chain Redstone announced on May 1 the launch of its mainnet, which will introduce a range of on-chain applications and autonomous worlds, following a joint effort by eight teams preparing their projects for public debut. The OP Chain was built by Lattice, a technical and product-focused company pushing the boundaries of Ethereum applications and infrastructure.
Among the releases going live with Redstone’s mainnet are a new game from Web3 gaming studio Small Brain Games, Moving Castle’s ‘This Cursed Machine’ and the on-chain real-time strategy (RTS) game ‘Sky Strife’ from Lattice.
Redstone will power many autonomous worlds built on Optimism’s Superchain through MUD, an open-source engine that serves as a framework for developers, said Ben Jones, co-founder of the Optimism Collective and director of the Optimism Foundation. “Our goal is to make using chains feel as easy and seamless as using the Internet,” Jones adds.
Capturing attention
Along with the mainnet launch announcement, Redstone is also calling on developers to build using the MUD framework. However, it’s a tough time to grab the market’s attention as the spotlight is on the meme coin sector. As reported by Crypto Briefing, meme coins were the most profitable stories in the first quarter, and Variant Fund co-founder Li Jin sees them as new go-to-market strategies. Jones of Optimism Collective, however, isn’t worried.
“Meme coins can be an entertaining and valuable way to test the functionality, user experience and scalability of crypto systems, but building developers for the long term is about more than just trends. Within the Optimism Collective, our priority is to grow the Superchain ecosystem, engage more developers around the world, bring more users into the chain and build a sustainable future in crypto,” he emphasizes.
Justin Gilbert, co-founder and CEO of Lattice, emphasizes that developers have had a passionate interest in on-chain games and autonomous worlds for several years, and that interest in building on-chain games is not dictated by cycles.
“The increased sophistication in developer tools has given rise to on-chain games that we hope can one day rival traditional games and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). With Redstone we are building something more like a computer than a chain, which will be a home for all the games built with MUD,” Gilbert adds.
MUD application
Sky Strife is one of the applications powered by MUD, and the game saw over 400,000 transactions, 3,300 matches and 1,900 unique players during its three-month testing phase.
Gilbert, from Lattice, explained that the game had been in the works for almost two years. After several testing sessions, Gilbert says the game has been vastly improved and simplified, and part of that may have to do with the MUD framework used in development.
“We have a growing player base for the game, with user-built plugins to improve gameplay, and even community-built leaderboards and analytics. A core tenet of autonomous worlds – and something that is possible in any game built with MUD on Redstone – is the ability to create mods and plugins that extend the original world. We believe these types of applications will be more attractive to both onchain and traditional gamers,” he says.
Lattice’s CEO also explains that Redstone adopts the on-plasma protocol, which allows developers to use any data availability solution to run a chain, resulting in more options. This means that the data from applications built on Redstone can be stored in dedicated solutions, such as Celestia, without the need for new forms of consensus outside of Ethereum.
“For Redstone, this means on-chain games can run with ultra-cheap transactions and handle more users and throughput. A major bottleneck with previously on-chain games was the amount of data they could process. We expect Redstone to enable on-chain applications and autonomous worlds that would not otherwise have been possible,” concludes Gilbert.