A16z is placing a bet on Solana gaming

MagicBlock is using ephemeral rollups to develop a gaming engine that lets video games run fully onchain

article-image

Prostock-studio/Shutterstock modified by Blockworks

share


Today, enjoy the Lightspeed newsletter on Blockworks.co. Tomorrow, get the news delivered directly to your inbox. Subscribe to the Lightspeed newsletter


The Solana-based gaming company MagicBlock has raised $3 million in pre-seed funding that includes an investment from venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz following MagicBlock’s participation in a16z’s crypto startup accelerator earlier this year.

MagicBlock is developing a gaming engine that lets video games run fully onchain, a task that would typically be difficult due to the relatively low speed involved with using blockchains. The company solves this with a novel piece of technology it calls ephemeral rollups, which temporarily move Solana’s state to a higher-throughput rollup before settling back to the layer-1.

MagicBlock drew the online Solana world’s attention after posting a video of its game engine that drew 429,000 views on X. 

With the fresh funding, the six-person startup will aim to grow its team as well as develop its tech, which would include bringing its game engine to Solana mainnet and partnering with onchain games. 

MagicBlock was founded in September 2023 by Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco. The duo decided to create the company while building a fully onchain game and realizing how poor the user experience was, Fortugno told me in a soon-to-be-released Lightspeed podcast episode

MagicBlock believes games running fully onchain benefit from being composable (meaning other developers can build on top of a game’s smart contracts) and not relying quite so much on third parties, but it’s hard to make a decentralized computer program run at the speed that gamers demand. 

“Players get pissed off if they have 100ms latency, so forget half a second,” Fortugno said. 

So MagicBlock is developing ephemeral rollups, which make a slightly different bet than many competitors in the blockchain gaming space. Axie Infinity-linked Ronin created an Ethereum-compatible blockchain. Immutable and Sonic both operate layer-2s. Instead, MagicBlock is trying to build technology that extends Solana’s base layer. This could avoid fragmenting liquidity or leeching fees away from the layer-1, which are common criticisms made of the layer-2 ecosystem on Ethereum.

Ephemeral rollups make use of a specialized version of Solana’s software which temporarily lets a sequencer modify accounts before settling back to Solana. The rollups initially use optimistic verification, the method favored by EVM giants Arbitrum and Optimism, for speed before verifying transactions with zero-knowledge proofs. 

As an idea, ephemeral rollups are made possible by the fact that Solana separates its state and logic, or accounts and programs, so the logic can stay put while the state moves to an ephemeral rollup.

It’s an innovative approach to game development, particularly in a crypto gaming space that so far has drawn lots of investment while delivering minimal payoff

But Fortugno thinks gaming is often at the frontier of technological development. He offered GPUs as an example: Before they were powering the AI boom, the circuits were used to speed up the graphics in video games.


Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:

Tags

Upcoming Events

Old Billingsgate

Mon - Wed, October 13 - 15, 2025

Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit (DAS) will feature conversations between the builders, allocators, and legislators who will shape the trajectory of the digital asset ecosystem in the US and abroad.

Industry City | Brooklyn, NY

TUES - THURS, JUNE 24 - 26, 2025

Permissionless IV serves as the definitive gathering for crypto’s technical founders, developers, and builders to come together and create the future.If you’re ready to shape the future of crypto, Permissionless IV is where it happens.

Brooklyn, NY

SUN - MON, JUN. 22 - 23, 2025

Blockworks and Cracked Labs are teaming up for the third installment of the Permissionless Hackathon, happening June 22–23, 2025 in Brooklyn, NY. This is a 36-hour IRL builder sprint where developers, designers, and creatives ship real projects solving real problems across […]

recent research

Research Report Templates.png

Research

Despite ending its points program, Hyperliquid has maintained a dominant market position with 77% of perpetuals DEX volumes, though overall volume has decreased from early 2025. It is the only DEX that has been able to compete with CEX volumes. Hyperliquid's success stems primarily from rapid, relevant token listings and superior UX for users and market makers, particularly its API - which is how market makers interact with the protocol. The controversial oracle price override during the JELLY incident exposed risks in the Hyperliquid Liquidity Pool (HLP), though the team has since implemented risk management adjustments. The HyperEVM is currently underoptimized and lacks necessary precompiles, but represents an important strategic expansion to enable asset issuance and DeFi composability.

article-image

The Balkan micronation went from Bitcoin economy to blockchain buzzwords in 10 years

article-image

While BTC’s year-to-date price drop resembles that of the S&P 500, some crypto stocks have fared way worse

article-image

The first batch of earnings reports from big banks shows lending is on the rise, a sign businesses and consumers are feeling better about the economy

article-image

Movement is “conducting an internal investigation stemming from recent events,” according to a company Slack message

article-image

Four firms prepare their launches on the Toronto Stock Exchange while the SEC mulls proposals

article-image

Publicly-listed Janover announced last week that a group of ex-Kraken employees had acquired a majority stake in the company