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Gaming infrastructure startup MagicBlock Solana is making its ephemeral validator — which creates Solana instantaneous blocks that can process transactions faster — open source, the team exclusively tells Lightspeed.

When MagicBlock I went through a16z's cryptocurrency startup accelerator It began announcing its technology earlier this year, envisioning itself as infrastructure for building on-chain games. But when I recently spoke with Andrea Fortigno, co-founder and CEO of MagicBlock, he offered me a broader vision — that MagicBlock ephemeral clusters could allow all developers to move away from traditional web servers and make applications “unstoppable.”

To be clear, games are still being built using the MagicBlock architecture. Supersize, which won the Solana-focused Radar hackathon last month, is built on MagicBlock. The same goes for Windfall, the gaming project that ranked third on Radar. For both games, MagicBlock provides a way to play on-chain without sacrificing speed.

MagicBlock does this by running a non-voting Solana validator that runs in parallel with Solana and can make compute resources momentarily "elastic" before a security committee checks and resolves the state at the first layer. In other words, Solana data is temporarily transferred to a backlog (such as Optimism on Ethereum) for some time- or resource-sensitive function that is typically executed off-chain on centralized servers.

This new open source technology is initially subject to a license that will prevent other projects from launching commercial products using the ephemeral validator unless they strike a deal with MagicBlock, Fortugno said. MagicBlock currently charges at the protocol level as well.

Despite the new gaming clients, the focus on other cryptocurrency sectors is also evident in MagicBlock's messaging. I asked Fortugno if this is because cryptocurrency games outside of a few rare games like Off the Grid have so far failed to live up to the hype.

Fortugno disagreed with the assessment that cryptocurrency gaming faces difficulties, and said other use cases could benefit from effortless, ephemeral collections.

“The technology already exists, so it would be foolish not to try to address other use cases,” Fortugno said. He also said that SocialFi apps and perpetual futures DEXs are looking to build on MagicBlock. DeFi makes sense as a use case here: Solana-based DEX Zeta Markets is building its own Solana 2 layer to compete with centralized exchange speeds.

Fortugno used the term “unstoppable” repeatedly in our interview, which is actually what’s great about ephemeral collections. Many Solana applications have parts managed by central entities, partly because doing everything on a blockchain isn't financially feasible. If MagicBlock lives up to its billing, it could make these apps a lot less reliable.

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