Missed the excitement of GamesBeat Summit? Don’t worry! Tune in now to follow all live and virtual sessions here.
Saga, the Web3 scalability protocol, attracted 224 projects to its Innovator program in less than a year. And 80% of them are focused on games.
The program offers a comprehensive ecosystem of tools and resources for developers, eliminating the need for them to build back-end systems. Saga has achieved this through its partnerships with industry leaders such as Celestia Labs, Polygon and Ava Labs. Back in September 2022, Saga only had 55 projects.
As CEO Rebecca Liao previously described to us, Saga is a Web3 infrastructure protocol that allows developers to build gaming and entertainment applications with their own dedicated block space. Dedicated block space ensures high throughput, no dependency on other applications using Saga, easy upgrading, and congestion relief. In other words, it eliminates certain bottlenecks preventing blockchain technology from reaching the general public.
Additionally, gas fees (or those associated with energy used for transactions) for the infrastructure remain predictable and are by default hidden from the end user, Saga allows developers to use any token or currency for their applications. The automated deployment of the dedicated block space will be secured via cross-chain security by the same set of validators that underpin the Saga mainnet.
Saga’s partnership with Celestia Labs involves the implementation of sequencers as a service to scale the deployment architecture. Meanwhile, its partnership with Polygon is accelerating the development and adoption of Application Chains as the mainstream scaling solution for Web3.
The Saga protocol automates the instantiation of Supernets, Polygon’s appchain solution. Finally, Saga’s collaboration with Ava Labs will see the release of a software stack that automates the instantiation of subnets, Avalanche’s appchain solution.
“Saga’s mission is to change the way developers build games, entertainment systems and financial platforms, using our leadership position in appchain technologies,” Liao said. “Our partners share the same vision, and their support has encouraged us to create the world’s best protocol for scaling blockchain infrastructure, accessible to developers large and small.”
Projects in Saga’s Innovator Program include experiences such as Another World, Ailand, and TBA Games. The work of the Innovators using Saga and their creations can be seen on the Saga website, along with additional characters, stories, and games created as a result of Innovator Multiverse collaborations.
In the coming weeks, Saga plans to share more of its efforts with game developers. The company was founded in 2022 by Web3 Liao executives Jin Kwon, Jacob McDorman and Bogdan Alexandrescu.
Early seed investors include Maven11, Longhash, Samsung, Com2uS, and Polygon. Originally built on Cosmos, Saga has expanded its presence by integrating typically disparate ecosystems into its Saga Multiverse through ongoing strategic partnerships.
Liao said that the foundation of Saga is with the Cosmos Protocol, which calls itself “the internet of blockchains” and allows users to create their own blockchains. But doing this can be painful.
The Cosmos network consists of many independent parallel blockchains, called “zones”, each powered by classic consensus protocols like Tendermint. Zones serve as hubs for other zones, enabling interoperability. Other blockchains don’t do as well with interoperability. With Cosmos and its hub, you can plug in any blockchain and pass tokens between zones, without an intermediary. Intermediaries have been at risk of hacking in the past.
Cosmos was launched in 2014 by developers Ethan Buchman and Jae Kwon, who created the Tendermint consensus algorithm behind the network. The published a white paper in 2016 and launched the ATOM token the same year. Non-profit group The Interchain Foundation helped launch Cosmos as the “Internet of Blockchains”. It is interoperability that will lead to the metaverse, Liao believes.
Cosmos is secured by the ATOM token. By allowing businesses to set up their own blockchains, Cosmos enables better performance for things like transactions. In 2020, Cosmos released IBC, or inter-blockchain communications. This communication protocol allows interoperability between chains. Bridges, on the other hand, are prone to hacking, as Sky Mavis discovered when his Ronin bridge was hacked and he lost over $600 million in funds from his Axie Infinity blockchain game.
Liao thinks monolithic chains like Ethereum are inefficient when it comes to congestion and throughput. She believes app chains are more appropriate when it comes to entertainment and games, especially those using non-fungible tokens (NFTs) where interoperability is important.
Saga believes the metaverse will be a “multiverse,” where developers decide to launch their own channels, and the company will work with teams that share that vision.
The GamesBeat credo when covering the video game industry is “where passion meets business”. What does that mean? We want to tell you how much the news means to you, not only as a decision maker in a game studio, but also as a game fan. Whether you read our articles, listen to our podcasts, or watch our videos, GamesBeat will help you learn about and engage with the industry. Discover our Briefings.
