What is magicblock?

It's a taste of what's to come in the Solana gaming scene 🎮

A beginner's guide to the Onchain Game Engine 👇

Onchain game engines make it easier to build games with no external dependencies beyond their underlying blockchain.

To me, this is one of the most exciting areas of development in crypto today, and that’s why my curiosity was piqued when I recently came across MagicBlock Engine.

MagicBlock is a game engine that’s innovated an Ephemeral Rollups architecture for powering flexible and performant onchain games on Solana.

I think MagicBlock is an interesting look into what's to come in the Solana gaming scene, so let’s catch you up on all the basics.

What Is MagicBlock?
MagicBlock is a gaming framework built on top of Solana, designed to facilitate the development of fully onchain games and apps.

Recently, MagicBlock Engine showcased its capabilities at an a16zcrypto Demo Day event.

The demo featured a real-time, fully onchain game deployed entirely on Solana, and two clients played the game simultaneously with no lag thanks to the MagicBlock’s ability to delegate accounts into fast Solana validators.

What Are Ephemeral Rollups?
MagicBlock extends Solana's capabilities by introducing Ephemeral Rollups (ERs), which are designed to efficiently facilitate state transitions without fragmenting a game’s state.

MagicBlock’s Other Main Features

⚡️ BOLT — A framework that uses the Entity Component System (ECS) pattern to streamline the development of onchain games. It allows developers to quickly create modular, reusable, and extendable game components and logic.

🪪 SOAR — SOAR stands for Solana Onchain Achievement & Ranking. This reputation system lets developers readily define achievements based on onchain activities, track and display user rankings, and deploy rewards.

🔑 Session keys — MagicBlock recently helped add support for session keys in the Solana Unity SDK, making it easier for its game devs to eliminate the need for repeated wallet popups during frequent in-game interactions in a secure fashion.

MagicBlock’s angle is to bypass these fragmentation issues by keeping assets on mainnet Solana, thus maintaining the possibility for atomic composability, while still achieving scalability with ERs. This way you get high throughput, customizable runtimes, and the ability for games and apps to seamlessly interact without needing interoperability solutions.

What to Watch Going Forward?
1. MagicBlock is new and still rearing up. Which onchain game will be the first to officially use this engine?

2. The recent MagicBlock demo achieved 50ms latency, which is competitive with modern gaming standards. Can we expect further optimizations that bring this latency even lower for even better real-time gameplay?

3. Earlier this year, Parallel announced its AI game Colony would be based on Solana. Could the Parallel team adopt MagicBlock Engine to meet its infrastructure needs here?

4. With MagicBlock maintaining assets on the Solana mainnet, developers have the potential for atomic composability. What use cases will emerge from this capability?

5. Onchain games benefit greatly from user-generated content (UGC) and user-generated logic (UGL). Will the SOAR system be used to incentivize these sorts of creations?

The Bottom Line
While MagicBlock is still in its early stages, its potential to catalyze Solana’s fully onchain gaming scene seems considerable, as its Ephemeral Rollups architecture can help it bypass key challenges faced by other gaming engines while still ensuring high performance. Looking ahead, be sure to stay updated on the team’s progress by following them on Twitter— they’re ones to watch in my opinion!

Written by WPeaster

Here are the most bullish narratives you should pay attention this Q3.

🐶 Memes
• $WIF
• $PEPE
• $PEIPEI
• $POPCAT
• $MOG
• $MICHI
• $PONK

🏛️ RWAs
• $ONDO
• $RIO
• $CHEX
• $IXS
• $BOSON
• $LAND

🤖 AIs
• $TAO
• $QUBIC
• $RNDR
• $PAAL
• $ASI
• $FET

🔶 BTCFi
• $STAMP
• $BILLY
• $RSIC
• $PUPS
• $MUBI

⚙️ L1s
• $KAS
• $SOL
• $INJ
• $DIONE
• $ALPH
• $TRIAS
• $TON

🎮 Gaming
• $KARRAT
• $NAKA
• $KATA
• $CROWN
• $METAL
• $BRN
• $UPO

📲Social network

• $BULL

🪙 Others
• $ATOR
• $VELO
• $GHX
• $JASMY
• $CSIX
• $ROSE

Did I miss anything fam?