According to Blockworks, MagicBlock, a Solana-based gaming company, has raised $3 million in seed funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz. MagicBlock participated in a16z’s accelerator program earlier this year.
MagicBlock is developing a gaming engine that runs entirely on-chain, addressing the slowness of blockchains through a technique called ephemeral rollups, which temporarily moves Solana’s state to a high-throughput rollup before settling back to layer-1.
A video of MagicBlock’s game engine released received 429,000 views on X. The company plans to use the funds to expand its team and bring its game engine to the Solana mainnet while working with on-chain games.
MagicBlock was founded by Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco in September 2023. Fortugno said they decided to create the company after realizing that the user experience was poor when developing fully on-chain games.
MagicBlock believes that games that run entirely on the chain are composable and do not rely on third parties, but it is very difficult to achieve the speed required by players. Ephemeral rollups increase speed by temporarily modifying accounts and then using zero-knowledge proofs to verify transactions.
This innovative approach avoids the problems of dispersed liquidity or fee loss and is an important attempt at blockchain game development.
