MagicBlock
MagicBlock is a gaming framework built on top of Solana, designed to facilitate the development of fully onchain games and apps. The demo featured a real-time, fully onchain game deployed entirely on Solana, and two clients played the game simultaneously with no lag thanks to the MagicBlock’s ability to delegate accounts into fast Solana validators.
MagicBlock extends Solana's capabilities by introducing Ephemeral Rollups (ERs), which are designed to efficiently facilitate state transitions without fragmenting a game’s state.
An ER operates as a specialized Solana Virtual Machine (SVM)-based runtime, which can be customized to support features like gasless transactions, transaction scheduling, and quicker block times. https://scrapbox.io/files/6684ce9c44c2e4001cee21cd.png
https://scrapbox.io/files/6684d283c7a42d001c990f65.png
⚡️ BOLT — A framework that uses the Entity Component System (ECS) pattern to streamline the development of onchain games. It allows developers to quickly create modular, reusable, and extendable game components and logic. 🪪 SOAR — SOAR stands for Solana Onchain Achievement & Ranking. This reputation system lets developers readily define achievements based on onchain activities, track and display user rankings, and deploy rewards. 🔑 Session keys — MagicBlock recently helped add support for session keys in the Solana Unity SDK, making it easier for its game devs to eliminate the need for repeated wallet popups during frequent in-game interactions in a secure fashion. The Ethereum gaming scene has various promising onchain gaming engines, e.g. MUD by Lattice, Keystone by Curio, and Dojo by Cartridge. However, one common design pattern in this early scene is deploying games on their own distinct rollups, which can pose various composability and fragmentation challenges that are still being tackled.
MagicBlock’s angle is to bypass these fragmentation issues by keeping assets on mainnet Solana, thus maintaining the possibility for atomic composability, while still achieving scalability with ERs. This way you get high throughput, customizable runtimes, and the ability for games and apps to seamlessly interact without needing interoperability solutions.
The recent MagicBlock demo achieved 50ms latency, which is competitive with modern gaming standards.