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Saga, the Web3 scalability protocol, has drawn 224 projects to its Innovator Program in under a year. And 80% of those are focused on games.
The program offers a comprehensive ecosystem of tools and resources for developers, removing 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 had just 55 projects.
As described to us before by CEO Rebecca Liao, Saga is a Web3 infrastructure protocol that empowers developers to build gaming and entertainment applications with their own dedicated blockspace. Dedicated blockspace ensures high throughput, no dependencies on other applications using Saga, easy upgradability and congestion relief. That is, it gets rid of some bottlenecks holding back blockchain tech from reaching the mainstream.
In addition, gas fees (or those associated with the energy used for transactions) for 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 dedicated blockspace will be secured via interchain security by the same set of validators that underlie the Saga mainnet.
Saga’s partnership with Celestia Labs involves implementing sequencers-as-a-service to scale rollup architecture. Meanwhile, its partnership with Polygon accelerates the development and adoption of appchains as a dominant 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 create games, entertainment systems and financial platforms, using our leadership position in appchain technologies,” said Liao. “Our partners share the same vision, and their support has emboldened us further to create the world’s best protocol for scaling blockchain infrastructure, accessible to small and large developers alike.”
Among the projects in Saga’s Innovator Program are experiences such as Another World, Ailand, and TBA Games. The work of Innovators using Saga and their creations can be seen on Saga’s 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 aimed at game developers. The company was founded in 2022 by Web3 leaders Liao, 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 bringing typically disparate ecosystems into its Saga Multiverse through ongoing strategic partnerships.
Liao said that Saga’s foundation is with the Cosmos protocol, which calls itself the “internet of blockchains” and allows users to create their own blockchains. But doing that can be painful.
The Cosmos network consists of many independent, parallel blockchains, called “zones,” each powered by classical consensus protocols like Tendermint. The zones serve as hubs for other zones, enabling interoperability. Other blockchains don’t do so well with interoperability. With Cosmos and its hub, you can plug any blockchain into it and pass tokens between the zones, without an intermediary. The intermediaries have been at-risk for hacking in the past.
Cosmos was started 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. The nonprofit group The Interchain Foundation helped launch Cosmos as “the internet of blockchains.” It’s the interoperability that will lead to the metaverse, Liao believes.
Cosmos is secured by the ATOM token. By enabling companies to set up their own blockchains, Cosmos enables better performance for things like transactions. In 2020, Cosmos released IBC, or inter-blockchain communications. That communication protocol enables interoperability between chains. By contrast, bridges are prone to hacking, as Sky Mavis discovered when its Ronin bridge was hacked and it lost more than $600 million in funds from its Axie Infinity blockchain game.
Liao believes that monolithic chains like Ethereum are inefficient when it comes to congestion and throughput. She thinks app chains are more appropriate when it comes to entertainment and games, particular those that use non-fungible tokens (NFTs) where interoperability matters.
Saga believes the metaverse will be a “multiverse,” where developers will decide to launch their own chains, and the company will work with those teams who share that vision.
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