MagicBlock Secures $3 Million Pre-Seed Funding For Onchain Gaming Engine

According to Blockworks, the Solana-based gaming company MagicBlock has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding, which includes an investment from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. This funding follows MagicBlock’s participation in a16z’s crypto startup accelerator earlier this year. MagicBlock is developing a gaming engine that allows video games to run fully onchain, addressing the challenge of blockchain's relatively low speed with a technology called ephemeral rollups. These rollups temporarily move Solana’s state to a higher-throughput rollup before settling back to the layer-1. MagicBlock gained significant attention in the online Solana community after posting a video of its game engine, which garnered 429,000 views on X. With the new funding, the six-person startup aims to expand its team and further develop its technology. This includes bringing its game engine to the Solana mainnet and partnering with onchain games. MagicBlock was founded in September 2023 by Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco, who decided to create the company while building a fully onchain game and realizing the poor user experience. MagicBlock believes that games running fully onchain benefit from being composable, allowing other developers to build on top of a game’s smart contracts, and reducing reliance on third parties. However, achieving the speed required by gamers is challenging. To address this, MagicBlock is developing ephemeral rollups, which differ from many competitors in the blockchain gaming space. Unlike Axie Infinity-linked Ronin, which created an Ethereum-compatible blockchain, or Immutable and Sonic, which operate layer-2s, MagicBlock aims to extend Solana’s base layer. This approach could avoid fragmenting liquidity or leeching fees away from the layer-1, common criticisms of the layer-2 ecosystem on Ethereum. Ephemeral rollups utilize a specialized version of Solana’s software, allowing a sequencer to temporarily modify accounts before settling back to Solana. Initially, these rollups use optimistic verification for speed, similar to EVM giants Arbitrum and Optimism, before verifying transactions with zero-knowledge proofs. This innovative approach is made possible by Solana’s separation of state and logic, allowing the state to move to an ephemeral rollup while the logic remains. MagicBlock’s development is seen as a significant step in the crypto gaming space, which has attracted substantial investment but has yet to deliver significant results. Fortugno believes that gaming often drives technological advancements, citing GPUs as an example, which were initially used to enhance video game graphics before powering the AI boom.