Improbable Announces Contributions to Somnia’s Blockchain Breakthroughs 

This week, Somnia began our Road to Devnet with a series of announcements that detailed our updated whitepaper, our technical specifications, and Improbable’s role in the development of the Somnia blockchain.

Somnia is developed by Virtual Society Foundation, an independent organization initiated by Improbable, a British start-up that has been at the forefront of building virtual worlds for over a decade. VSF received initial funding from MSquared who raised $150 million in funding from a16z crypto, SoftBank, Mirana Ventures, CMT Digital, and SIG.

A Collaborative Effort

Improbable’s venture builder model supports Somnia by providing world-class engineering talent, breakthrough technologies, and critical resources. Additionally, The Virtual Society Foundation, which secured funding from M², continues to play a pivotal role in Somnia’s evolution. M², an interoperable network of metaverses, raised $150 million from leading investors like Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank Vision Fund 2, underscoring the industry’s excitement around projects like Somnia.

Unmatched Speed and Scalability

Somnia offers unmatched speed, capable of handling more than 400,000 TPS. This impressive throughput opens up a range of possibilities for applications that require real-time interactions. Whether it’s a fully on-chain game, social application or a complex DeFi system, Somnia’s scalability ensures that the user experience remains smooth, even under heavy traffic.

Seamless Integration with EVM

Somnia’s EVM compatibility makes it easy for developers to transition from existing EVM-based blockchains without needing to learn a new system. Developers can migrate their decentralized applications (dApps) and leverage Somnia’s superior performance, all while using the familiar EVM tooling. This compatibility also enables seamless bridging of assets and applications between Somnia and other EVM-compatible chains, creating a rich, interconnected ecosystem.

Breakthrough Technology: Multistream Consensus, ICEdb and Advanced Compression

Somnia’s new Multistream Consensus enables sub-second block finality and higher transaction throughput. Sequential execution and Compression algorithms efficiently handle high-density scenarios, moving 10-20x more data between nodes than other blockchains. A new custom database, IceDB, enables read/write times of 70-100 nanoseconds, minimizing transaction costs to below a cent. This makes it the perfect platform for building large-scale, real-time applications in gaming, social, metaverses, Finance and more, for millions of users, all fully on-chain, making the EVM more efficient than ever before.

A New Era for Developers and Consumers

According to Herman Narula, Founder and CEO of Improbable, “By applying our knowledge from gaming and distributed systems, we’ve cracked the scalability problem that has long hindered blockchain technology. Somnia will transform how digital experiences are built and shared, empowering developers to build a more open and equitable digital assets economy.”

Paul Thomas, Founder of The Virtual Society Foundation, emphasized how Somnia’s unprecedented blockchain capabilities are setting the stage for real-time, mass-consumer applications. “From fully on-chain games and social networks to immersive virtual worlds and user-friendly DeFi, we’re enabling use cases that were once unimaginable,” he said.

Make sure you’re following Improbable and the Somnia community channels for all the latest updates, because there is a ton of news on the way! 

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