OP Chain Redstone announced the launch of its mainnet on May 1st, which will introduce a suite of on-chain applications and autonomous worlds, following a concerted effort by eight teams preparing their projects for the public debut. The OP Chain is built by Lattice, an engineering and product-focused company pushing the envelope of Ethereum applications and infrastructure.
Among the releases set to go live with Redstone’s mainnet are a new game by Web3 gaming studio Small Brain Games, Moving Castles’ “This Cursed Machine,” and the on-chain real-time strategy (RTS) game “Sky Strife” by Lattice.
Redstone will power many autonomous worlds built on Optimism’s Superchain through MUD, an open-source engine that serves as a framework for developers, says Ben Jones, co-founder of the Optimism Collective and a director of the Optimism Foundation. “Our goal is to make using chains feel just as simple and seamless as using the internet,” Jones adds.
Capturing attention
Along with the announcement of its mainnet launch, Redstone also calls developers to build using the MUD framework. However, it is a difficult time to capture the attention of the market, since the spotlight is on the meme coin sector. As reported by Crypto Briefing, meme coins were the most profitable narratives in Q1, and Variant Fund co-founder Li Jin sees them as new go-to-market strategies. Jones, from Optimism Collective, is not worried though.
“Meme coins can be an entertaining and valuable way to test the mechanics, user experience, and scalability of crypto systems, but developers’ building for the long term are focused on more than trends. Within the Optimism Collective, our priority is growing the Superchain ecosystem, engaging more developers across the world, bringing more users on-chain, and building for a sustainable future in crypto,” he highlights.
Justin Gilbert, co-founder and CEO of Lattice, highlights that developers have maintained an ardent interest in on-chain games and autonomous worlds for some years, and the interest in building on-chain games is not dictated by cycles.
“The increased sophistication in developer tooling has given rise to on-chain games that we hope will one day rival traditional games and massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). With Redstone, we are building something more akin to a computer than a chain, which will be able to be a home to all games built with MUD,” Gilbert adds.
MUD application
Sky Strife is one of the applications powered by MUD, and the game saw over 400,000 transactions, 3,300 matches, and 1,900 unique players over its three-month time test phase.
Gilbert, from Lattice, explained that the game had been in the works for almost two years. After different testing sessions, Gilbert says that the game was greatly improved and simplified, and part of that can be related to the MUD framework used in the development.
“We have a growing player base for the game, with plugins built by users to augment gameplay, and even community-build leaderboards and analytics. One core tenet of autonomous worlds — and something possible in every game built with MUD running on Redstone — is the ability to make mods and plugins that extend the initial world. We believe these kinds of applications will be more engaging for onchain and traditional gamers alike,” he shares.
The CEO of Lattice also explains that Redstone applies the op-plasma protocol, which allows developers to utilize any data availability solution for running a chain, resulting in more options. This means that the data from the applications built on Redstone could be stored in dedicated solutions, such as Celestia, without requiring new forms of consensus outside of Ethereum.
“For Redstone, this means that on-chain games will be able to run with super-cheap transactions and handle more users and throughput. One big bottleneck to on-chain games before was the amount of data they were able to handle. We expect Redstone to enable on-chain applications and autonomous worlds that would not have been possible otherwise,” Gilbert concludes.