In a recent exclusive interview with Lightspeed, MagicBlock, a Solana gaming infrastructure startup, announced it is making its ephemeral validator — a tool that creates transient Solana rollups to expedite transaction processing — available as open source. This move marks a significant milestone for the company.
MagicBlock, a participant in a16z’s crypto startup accelerator, initially saw itself as a platform for building onchain games. But in a recent conversation with MagicBlock’s CEO and co-founder, Andrea Fortugno, he introduced a broader vision for the company. According to Fortugno, MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollups could empower developers to move away from traditional web servers, making applications “unstoppable.”
However, this doesn’t mean that gaming projects are off the table. Quite the contrary, Supersize, the winner of the Solana-centric Radar hackathon’s gaming track last month, was built on MagicBlock. The third-place gaming project, Windfall, was also developed using MagicBlock. Both games demonstrate how MagicBlock can allow onchain operations without compromising speed.
To achieve this, MagicBlock operates a non-voting Solana validator that runs alongside Solana. It can temporarily make computing resources “elastic” before a security committee checks the state and settles it to the layer-1. Essentially, Solana’s data is moved to a rollup temporarily for time- or resource-sensitive functions that would typically be performed offchain on centralized servers.
While this newly open-source tech is initially under a licence that prohibits other projects from launching commercial products using the ephemeral validator without striking a deal with MagicBlock, Fortugno stated that MagicBlock currently charges a protocol-level fee.
Despite the new gaming clients, the shift towards other crypto sectors is evident in MagicBlock’s messaging. When asked if this was due to the lackluster performance of crypto gaming with few exceptions like Off the Grid, Fortugno disagreed. He stated that other use cases could utilize ephemeral rollups with “zero effort.”
“The tech is already there, and so it would be stupid not to try to tackle the other use cases,” Fortugno said. He also mentioned that SocialFi apps and perpetual futures DEXs are considering building on MagicBlock. Solana-based perps DEX Zeta Markets is also in the process of creating a Solana layer-2 to compete with centralized exchange speeds.
Fortugno frequently referred to his platform as “unstoppable” during our interview, underlining the key benefit of ephemeral rollups. Many Solana apps remain partially controlled by centralized entities, primarily because running everything on a blockchain is not financially viable. However, if MagicBlock delivers on its promise, it could make these apps significantly more trustless, paving the way for a new era of decentralized application development.
