Gaming technology startup Improbable has announced plans to develop its own layer 1 blockchain, Somnia, which the company says will process more than 400,000 transactions per second.
Somnia, which plans to launch on Devnet in the coming weeks, has “solved the scalability problem that has long hampered blockchain technology,” Improbable founder and CEO Herman Narula said in a statement. He added that the company leveraged its “gaming and distributed systems knowledge” to develop Somnia, which envisions “consumer applications” including gaming, social platforms and decentralized finance (Challenge).
Improbable develops the fastest blockchain for consumer applications for @Somnia_Network! Leveraging Improbable’s 10+ years of expertise in distributed systems, Somnia will process over 400,000 TPS with sub-second latency and EVM compatibility.
– Improbable (@Improbableio) October 24, 2024
The EVM-enabled blockchain will use ICEdb’s “revolutionary technology”, which Improbable says offers “ultra-fast read/write times”, as well as “advanced compression algorithms” claimed to transfer data between 10 and 20 times 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 unfragmented data, leveraging “innovative compression strategies and a custom data ingestion layer” to minimize the bandwidth required for transaction data.
Improbable will contribute to “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 MSquared metaverse ecosystem (itself launched by Improbable in April 2023).
Virtual Society Foundation founder Paul Thomas said in a statement that “Somnia’s unprecedented blockchain capabilities are paving the way for real-time consumer applications.”
Given Improbable’s emphasis on metaverseIt’s no surprise that Somnia’s mission statement focuses on this particular application, with blockchain aiming to create “a network of rich experiences, useful and valuable virtual objects and decentralized enough to allow people to create real businesses without relying on a big gaming company.”
Although blockchain will initially focus on “gaming, the metaverse, and social experiences,” its creators wrote, it will ultimately 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.
Improbable, a Softbank-backed gaming startup, is perhaps best known within the crypto community for its association with Bored Monkeys Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, providing technology for the Otherside NFT Collection metaverse project.
After a $502 million Series B funding round in 2017, the company reached unicorn status with a valuation of over $1 billion, raising an additional $262 million and reaching a valuation of 3.4 billion dollars by the end of 2022 following the metaverse boom.
The company reported its first year of profit in 2023, after posting losses in the previous three financial years, following a series of austerity measures that led to significant job cuts.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.
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