If we want a digital reality that approximates the freedoms of our physical reality, mass adoption of blockchains is necessary. To achieve that reality in practice, blockchains need to be capable of handling Web-scale traffic. Saga, a L1 to launch virtual blockchains for infinite horizontal scalability, aims to be part of the solution by bringing lessons from modern cloud architectures to blockchains.
Saga’s virtual blockchains are called Chainlets, and Chainlets are designed to be dedicated to single applications, though they could host multiple applications if preferred. Each Chainlet is a fully decentralized, proof-of-stake chain with all the properties of a L1, except the requirement for a native staking token. Current throughput of each Chainlet is 6.8 million transactions/day, or ~80 transactions/second (TPS). If an application needs more throughput, additional Chainlets are spun up to accommodate the surge in demand, allowing for elastic scaling that grows infinitely with the application’s performance needs.
Deploying a Chainlet on Saga is a 1-minute process on its WebApp and can be done by non-developers. Building an application on a Chainlet currently requires developing for the EVM, but Saga aims to become VM-agnostic, eventually incorporating other major VMs like the SVM and MoveVM. Its virtual blockchain environment is highly programmable depending on the developer’s needs. For example, developers have full freedom to monetize their application without Saga charging a gas fee to the end user - Saga is committed to remaining costless on the front end to ensure a smooth user experience.
With the Cosmos SDK and IBC at Saga’s core, Chainlet-to-Chainlet interoperability is a given, and users can easily trade assets of varying kinds between Chainlet applications. With fast finality (5s) of Chainlets and a priority placed on interoperability with chains and ecosystems outside of Saga, Chainlets are only a stone's throw from all of crypto’s liquid assets.
Historically, spinning up new virtual blockchains like this has put strain on validator economics, which is why much of the Saga team’s time has been spent on optimizing how this works on the backend for validators. The result is an elegant model that offers developers commodity-level pricing for Chainlets, while making sure validators are profitable. Much of the inspiration for the design comes from modern cloud computing, which automatically spins up servers as needed, an area where the Saga technical team has significant expertise. The validator tooling they’ve built has proven valuable to the point where Saga has partnered with Avalanche and Polygon, to help them automate Subnets and CDK Chains, their respective versions of modular blockspace.
Scale is the design goal; mass adoption is the north star. To reach that north star, Saga focuses on gaming and entertainment.
Gaming today largely exists in fiefdoms, where content is policed by stodgy game studios, and in-game assets are tightly controlled within walled gardens. Upset the Lord of a gaming world, and you as a creator, or gamer, could be expelled from their land, your hard work and digital identity stripped of you. Make the Lord of a gaming world rich, and be content with taking a small pittance in the shadows.
Despite gaming as a pursuit to dip into the endless unknown, gaming worlds are far from experiencing the type of freedom an individual takes for granted in the physical world. Sure, ‘gaming works,’ for the most part, leading some to smirk at the idea of blockchains helping to improve gamers’ experience. But with the wider gaming industry in turmoil right now - layoffs, little truly original content, mass failures of indie studios - there is a golden opportunity for blockchains to present themselves as viable alternative substrates.
Blockchains offer a censor-resistant mechanism for digital assets and identities to be set free. Applied to the gaming world, that means not just the assets and identities that users generate in-game, but the games themselves, and the systems that distribute those games to a global audience. We suspect that if game creators can be set free, aided by the new business model of programmable royalty systems that many are now catching onto, they are likely to then also set their gamers free. Freedom begets freedom.
Over time, we expect all digital property rights to be recorded in the blockspace of the world’s most trusted blockchains. Blockspace holds the data about all the assets and entities in that chain. Wherever the most valuable assets and entities exist, interoperability in that blockspace will hold a premium, as it will be dense with entities engaging in exchange of their items. This is the value of settlement, something that cements itself as the result of success, but typically is not a pathway to success.
Saga aims to be that highly-trusted blockspace for gaming worlds, and that mission goes far beyond its technology. Saga is known for its boots-on-the-ground commitment to game creators, of which there are now over 250 building on the network (360 projects overall), and its relentless pursuit to be the most culturally and technically welcoming environment for game creators who want their players to exist in liberated spaces.
This year, it became the first chain to open a game publishing house, called Saga Origins, which specifically backs provocative, expansive and uncompromising games - titles that big studios often pass on due to “brand risk.” As frequently happens, big studios that have achieved much success in the past have become risk averse, limiting their creativity to the displeasure of gamers, opening a hole in the market for Saga Origins.
If you’re a “crypto person” and you hadn’t heard of Saga before its mainnet launch, that’s intentional – Saga has never pursued crypto narratives, preferring instead to focus its product on developers, creators and gamers (People have not forgotten it’s a L1, however, with DeFi flooding in post-launch). Its community-building relies on appealing to broad human values of freedom and the celebration of creative expression, together. It knows that when the mainstream comes, we have to inspire as much as agitate.
What are games if not dreams that only make sense in our social minds? And as we are currently seeing, machines will begin to dream creations into existence alongside humans, a trend that Saga is wholeheartedly prepared to embrace. And yet, increasingly, the gaming industry finds itself muffled by risk-averse businesspeople who think they have the power to say what “is” and “isn’t” okay to say and play - when at the core, their actions are largely motivated by market power and money. Free speech is the First Amendment of the Constitution for a reason. Saga rejects the status quo, creating a platform for game creators, gamers, and machines, to dream their craziest dreams.