Gaming tech startup Improbable has announced plans to develop its own Tier 1 blockchain, sleepwhich the firm claims will process over 400,000 transactions per second.

Somnia, which plans to launch on the devnet in the coming weeks, has “solved the scalability problem that has long hindered blockchain technology,” Improbable founder and CEO Herman Narula claimed in a statement. He added that the firm leveraged its “knowledge from games and distributed systems” to develop Somnia, which is targeting “mass consumer applications” including gaming, social platforms and decentralized finance (Defiant).

The EVM-enabled blockchain will use ICEdb’s “breakthrough technology,” which Improbable claims offers “ultra-fast read/write times,” along with “advanced compression algorithms” that claim to transfer data between 10 and 20 times more efficient than other blockchains. .

In initial testing with 100 validators, Somnia claims to have processed hundreds of thousands of EVM transactions per second on non-sharded data, leveraging “innovative compression strategies and a custom data assimilation layer” to minimize the bandwidth required for transaction data.

It is unlikely to contribute to the “key technical components” of the Somnia blockchain, while the project was initiated by Virtual Society Foundationan independent organization initiated by Improbable with initial funding from the MSquared metaverse ecosystem (itself launch of Unlikely in April 2023).

Virtual Society Foundation founder Paul Thomas said in a statement that “Somnia’s unprecedented blockchain capabilities pave the way for real-time applications for mass consumers.”

Given Improbable’s focus on metaverseno wonder Somnia’s mission statement focuses on that particular application, with blockchain aiming to create “A network of rich experiences, valuable virtual objects that are useful and decentralized enough to allow people to build real companies without depending on a single big gaming business.”

While the blockchain will initially focus on “gaming, metaverse and social experiences,” its creators he wroteit will eventually have a wider range of use cases. “We’re not even 100 percent sure what can be built with the technology we’re creating,” they said.

What is Improbable?

Softbank-backed gaming startup Improbable is perhaps best known among the crypto community for its association with Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, offering technology for NFT collections Other side metaverse project.

Following a $502 million Series B funding round in 2017, the firm achieved unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion. lift An additional $262 million and reaching a valuation of $3.4 billion by the end of 2022 on the back of the metaverse boom.

The firm posted its the first year profit in 2023 after posting losses in the past three financial years following a round of belt-tightening that saw job cuts.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.