Saga wants to push the boundaries of blockchain interoperability to improve the metaverse

Saga creates the interoperable blockchain middleware of the metaverse, the universe of virtual worlds that are all interconnected, as in novels like Snow Crash and Ready Player One.

And Saga has reached some interesting milestones on its journey. Last week, the company announced that AlphaNet Andromeda has arrived. This is the first version of the company’s blockchain network and it will first be released to 55 projects in the Saga Innovator Program, which are the blockchain partners.

“We are natives of the Web3, and therefore we come from the crypto world,” Rebecca Liao, CEO of Saga, said in an interview with GamesBeat. “And our thesis has always been that blockchain infrastructure, as it is now, is not sufficient to really allow applications to scale. And so we wanted to find a way to make the optimal infrastructure much more accessible and democratic. And that’s to get people into their own dedicated chains.”

Liao said 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 so can be painful.

The Cosmos network consists of many independent, parallel blockchains, called “zones”, each powered by classic consensus protocols such as Tendermint. The zones act as hubs for other zones, enabling interoperability. Other blockchains do not do so well with interoperability. With Cosmos and its hub, you can plug any blockchain into it and send tokens between zones, without an intermediary. The intermediaries have been exposed to 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. They published a white paper in 2016 and launched the ATOM token the same year. The non-profit organization The Interchain Foundation helped launch Cosmos as the “internet of blockchains.” It is the interoperability that will lead to the metaverse, believes Liao.

Cosmos is secured with 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 communication. This communication protocol enables interoperability between chains. In contrast, bridges are vulnerable to hacking, as Sky Mavis discovered when the Ronin Bridge was hacked and it lost more than $600 million in funds from its Axie Infinity blockchain game.

“This is what all Cosmos chains including us will use to communicate with other chains,” Liao said. “The two chains communicate and the assets are transferred. It’s a way to make sure there’s a secure communication channel between the two chains, and it doesn’t rely on any third party.”

“We allow developers to automatically get their applications into a dedicated chain. That’s the infrastructure we’re building. We’re focused on games and entertainment at the moment because we think those two sectors and Web3 are the ones that are most dependent on user experience expectations. And , and those most interested in accommodating the user experience.”

Liao believes that monolithic chains like Ethereum are inefficient when it comes to congestion and throughput. She believes app chains are more appropriate when it comes to entertainment and gaming, especially those using non-fungible tokens (NFT) where interoperability is important.

“When you build a chain on Cosmos, it’s your own chain, but Cosmos focuses on interoperability first,” Liao said. “That is also true for Saga. You are part of the Saga community.”

A group of whitelisted developers and the general public will gain access to Andromeda over the next few weeks. Andromeda is the first chapter in Saga’s journey to establish the main grid. It is part of a series of releases that build up to the full developer flow for launching applications in single-tenant virtual machines (VMs) on dedicated chains, or chains, on Saga.

Saga Innovator Program

Liao said that among the 55 projects in the innovator program are many game platforms, engines and game studios.

The participants in this are hand-picked projects that are pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology, especially when it comes to enabling a much wider market of developers to launch their own chains in games and entertainment.

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 that share that vision.

Innovators include role-playing games, multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) games, non-fungible token (NFT) platforms, GameFi projects, game tools and infrastructure, Web2 game studios expanding to their first Web3 titles, native Web3 game platforms, games and NFT decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), game engines and backends, a select few DeFi projects and much more.

Saga Innovators includes 55 companies such as Merit Circle, IndiGG, Gameplay Galaxy, Kujira, Satori, Pala.World, X.LA, VenturePunk, Passage, ThirdWeb, Champion Games, Game 7, Ftribe, P12, Cosmic Horizon, Reign of Terror, Planetarium , Infinity Keys, Crypto League, Coinfantasy, Flair.Finance, Eclipse, PG DAO, Adapter, Tallyup and many more.

In addition to early access to AlphaNet, Saga Innovator Program participants also receive extensive co-marketing from Saga and individual access to Saga’s technical resources for implementation. Once inside the program, a project will continue with our developer initiatives through Saga’s roadmap to the mainnet and beyond.

What is Saga?

Saga is a Web3 infrastructure protocol that allows developers to build gaming and entertainment applications with their own dedicated blockchain. Dedicated block space ensures high throughput, no dependency on other applications using Saga, easy upgrade and congestion relief. That is, it gets rid of some bottlenecks that hold back blockchain technology from reaching the mainstream.

Additionally, infrastructure gas fees remain predictable and hidden from the end user by default, Saga allows developers to use any token or currency for their applications. The automated distribution of dedicated block space will be secured via interchain security by the same set of validators that underpins the Saga network.

What is in Andromeda?

Andromeda is currently implemented as a developer tool that easily provides the necessary infrastructure and deploys Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible chains available via Solidity developer tools such as HardHat or Remix. Andromeda is ready-to-use as is and is the first step in Saga’s roadmap towards more complex features aimed at the metaverse (Saga calls it the multiverse) and greater automation on the Saga backend.

In the future, Saga will replace the centralized orchestration service with a decentralized chain, enable IBC chain interconnection and implement shared security for chains. For DevNet, Saga will introduce orchestration validation tools to help manage and coordinate chainlet deployment on decentralized chains.

Saga community members who are interested in being a part of the network itself will be given opportunities to become a node and participate in staking and delegation shortly after. We will keep everyone posted on these future releases.

Saga is a protocol for the automated distribution of application-specific blockchains in games, entertainment and DeFi. Through its platform, it aims to empower developers to build the next 1,000 chains in the multiverse. The company came out of stealth in March and in May raised $6.5 million, valuing the company at $130 million. The company has about 20 people. To date, Saga has raised $8.5 million.

“We spent a few months solidifying our vision,” Liao said. “We raised our seed round in May. Three days later, the market moved.”

The company has slowed hiring somewhat, although it is still bringing on technical people.

As for the crypto winter, Liao said the company was lucky to close the seed round before the collapse by a few days. That gave it a good war chest to build its technology.

“It’s never nice to be in a bear market. But what’s been good about it is that it’s forced a lot of these developers to think about games that are fun games, and not just based on a token value that goes up, Liao said. “So we’re seeing a lot of movement away from games to earn and a lot more emphasis on game design. That’s really where we sit pretty well. Because if you’re making a game that’s basically DeFi with stick figures, you probably don’t care that much about to invest in great infrastructure. But if you want to make a really fun game that just allows for the kind of response time the many worlds that a lot of passionate Web2 players expect, then this is the kind of infrastructure you need. So it’s been a lot of fun to actually talk to these games, and we’ve just seen a lot of demand.”