MagicBlock open sources a16z-backed ‘ephemeral rollup’ tech

The Solana gaming infrastructure startup MagicBlock is making its ephemeral validator — which creates momentary Solana rollups that can process transactions quicker — open source, the team told Lightspeed exclusively.

When MagicBlock went through a16z’s crypto startup accelerator and began advertising its tech earlier this year, it conceived of itself as infrastructure for building onchain games. But when I spoke with MagicBlock co-founder and CEO Andrea Fortugno recently, he pitched me on a broader vision — that MagicBlock’s ephemeral rollups could let all developers move away from traditional web servers and make apps “unstoppable.”

To be clear, games are still being built with MagicBlock’s architecture. Supersize, which won the Solana-centric Radar hackathon’s gaming track last month, is built on MagicBlock. So is Windfall, Radar’s third-place gaming project. For both games, MagicBlock offers a way to run onchain without sacrificing speed.

MagicBlock does this by running a non-voting Solana validator that runs in parallel with Solana and can momentarily make computing resources “elastic” before a security committee verifies the state and settles it to the layer-1. In other words, Solana’s data is temporarily moved to a rollup (like Optimism on Ethereum) for some time- or resource-sensitive functions that would ordinarily be performed offchain on centralized servers.

This newly open-source tech is initially under a license that will prevent other projects from launching commercial products with the ephemeral validator unless they strike a deal with MagicBlock, Fortugno said. MagicBlock currently charges a protocol-level fee as well.

Despite the new gaming clients, the pivot to other crypto sectors is also clear in MagicBlock’s messaging. I asked Fortugno if this was because crypto gaming outside of a few rare standouts like Off the Grid has so far failed to live up to the hype.

Fortugno disagreed with the assessment that crypto gaming is struggling, and he said other use cases could make use of ephemeral rollups with “zero effort.”

“The tech is already there, and so it would be stupid not to try to tackle the other use cases,” Fortugno said. He also said SocialFi apps and perpetual futures DEXs are looking at building on MagicBlock. DeFi makes sense as a use case here: Solana-based perps DEX Zeta Markets is building a Solana layer-2 of its own to compete with centralized exchange speeds.

Fortugno used the term “unstoppable” frequently in our interview, which is really what’s cool about ephemeral rollups. Many Solana apps have parts run by centralized entities partly because doing everything on a blockchain is not financially viable. If MagicBlock lives up to its billing, it could make these apps a lot more trustless.