The Solana Gaming Startup MagicBlock Makes Ephemeral Validator Open Source
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.
Expanding Vision Beyond Gaming
When MagicBlock went through a16z’s crypto startup accelerator and began advertising its tech earlier this year, it conceived of itself as infrastructure for building onchain games. 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.”
To be clear, games are still being built with MagicBlock’s architecture. Supersize, which won the Solana-centric Radar hackathon’s gaming track last month, is built on MagicBlock. So is Windfall, Radar’s third-place gaming project. For both games, MagicBlock offers a way to run onchain without sacrificing speed.
How MagicBlock Works
MagicBlock runs a non-voting Solana validator that operates in parallel with Solana and can temporarily make computing resources “elastic” before a security committee verifies the state and settles it to the layer-1. In other words, Solana’s data is temporarily moved to a rollup for time- or resource-sensitive functions that would typically be performed offchain on centralized servers.
This newly open-source tech is initially 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 currently charges a protocol-level fee as well.
Diversifying into Other Crypto Sectors
Despite the success in gaming clients, MagicBlock is also pivoting towards other crypto sectors. Fortugno mentioned that SocialFi apps and perpetual futures DEXs are looking at building on MagicBlock. DeFi also makes sense as a use case, with Solana-based perps DEX Zeta Markets building a Solana layer-2 to compete with centralized exchange speeds.
Fortugno emphasized the term “unstoppable” in our interview, highlighting the potential of ephemeral rollups to make apps more trustless by reducing reliance on centralized entities. If MagicBlock continues to deliver on its promises, it could revolutionize the way decentralized apps function.