Gaming technology startup Improbable has announced plans to develop its own layer 1 blockchain, Somnia, which the company claims will process more than 400,000 transactions per second.
Somnia, which plans to launch in devnet in the coming weeks, has “solved the scalability problem that has long hampered blockchain technology,” Improbable founder and CEO Herman Narula claimed in a statement. He added that the company has used its “knowledge from gaming and distributed systems” to develop Somnia, which focuses on “mass consumption applications” including gaming, social platforms and decentralized finance.DeFi).
Improbable develops the fastest blockchain for mass consumption applications for @Somnia_Network! Leveraging Improbable’s decade-plus of distributed systems expertise, Somnia can handle over 400,000 TPS with sub-second latency and EVM compatibility.https://t.co/iSjqSoHIKz
— Improbable (@Improbableio) October 24, 2024
The EVM-compatible blockchain will use ICEdb’s “breakthrough technology,” which according to Improbable delivers “ultra-fast read/write times,” along with “advanced compression algorithms” that claim to transfer data 10-20x more efficiently than other blockchains. .
In initial testing with 100 validators, Somnia claims to have processed hundreds of thousands of EVM transactions per second on non-sharded data, using “innovative compression strategies and a custom data ingestion layer” to minimize the bandwidth required for transaction data.
Improbable will contribute to the ‘key technical components’ of the Somnia blockchain, while the project was initiated by the Virtual Society Foundation, an independent organization initiated by Improbable with initial funding from the metaverse ecosystem MSquared (self-launched by Improbable in April 2023) .
Virtual Society Foundation founder Paul Thomas said in a statement that “Somnia’s unprecedented blockchain capabilities pave the way for real-time applications for mass consumption.”
Given Improbable’s focus on the metaverseit’s not surprising that Somnia’s mission focuses on that specific application, with the blockchain aiming to “create a network of rich experiences, useful valuable virtual objects and decentralized enough to enable people to build real businesses without to be dependent on one large gaming company.”
While the blockchain will initially focus on “gaming, metaverse and social experiences,” its creators wrote, it will eventually have a broader range of use cases. “We’re not even 100% sure what can be built with the technology we’re creating,” they said.
What is unlikely?
Softbank-backed gaming startup Improbable is perhaps best known among the crypto community for its association with Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, which provides the technology for the NFT collection’s Otherside metaverse project.
After a $502 million Series B funding round in 2017, the company achieved unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion, raising another $262 million and reaching a $3.4 billion valuation by the end of 2022 achieved in the wake of the metaverse boom.
The company posted its first year of profit in 2023, after posting losses in the previous three fiscal years, following a series of tightenings that saw the number of jobs fall significantly.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.