Solana gaming infrastructure startup MagicBlock is making its ephemeral validator — which creates temporary Solana rollups that can process transactions faster — open source, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.
When MagicBlock went through a16z’s crypto startup accelerator and started advertising its technology earlier this year, it saw itself as an infrastructure for building onchain games. But when I recently spoke with Andrea Fortugno, co-founder and CEO of MagicBlock, he presented me with a broader vision: that MagicBlock’s short-lived rollups could enable all developers to move away from traditional web servers and make apps “unstoppable.” to make.
To be clear, games are still being built using MagicBlock’s architecture. Supersize, which won the gaming track of the Solana-centric Radar hackathon last month, is built on MagicBlock. That includes Windfall, Radar’s third-place gaming project. For both games, MagicBlock offers a way to run onchain without sacrificing speed.
MagicBlock does this by running a nonvoting Solana validator that runs in parallel with Solana and can temporarily “elasticize” computing resources before a security committee verifies the state and places it in layer-1. In other words, Solana’s data is temporarily moved to a package (such as Optimism on Ethereum) for certain time- or resource-sensitive functions that would normally be performed offchain on centralized servers.
This new open-source technology will initially fall under a license that will prevent other projects from launching commercial products with the ephemeral validator unless they strike a deal with MagicBlock, Fortugno said. MagicBlock also currently charges a fee at the protocol level.
Despite the new gaming customers, the pivot to other crypto sectors is also evident in MagicBlock’s messaging. I asked Fortugno if this was because crypto gaming, aside from a few rare highlights like Off the Grid, has so far failed to live up to the hype.
Fortugno disagreed with the assessment that crypto gaming is struggling, and he said other use cases could leverage short-lived rollups without any hassle.
“The technology is already there, so it would be foolish not to try to address the other use cases,” Fortugno said. He also said that SocialFi apps and perpetual future DEXs are looking to build on MagicBlock. DeFi makes sense as a use case here: Solana-based offenders DEX Zeta Markets is building its own Solana layer-2 to compete with centralized exchange speeds.
Fortugno used the term “unstoppable” a lot in our interview, which is really what’s fun about short-lived rollups. Many Solana apps have components controlled by centralized entities, in part because everything on a blockchain is not financially feasible. If MagicBlock lives up to its billing, it could make these apps a lot more reliable.