Gaming technology startup Improbable has announced plans to develop its own layer-1 blockchain, Somnia, which the firm claims will process over 400,000 transactions per second.

Somnia, which plans to launch in devnet in the coming weeks, has "cracked the scalability problem that has long hindered blockchain technology," Improbable founder and CEO Herman Narula claimed in a statement. He added that the firm leveraged its "knowledge from gaming and distributed systems" to develop Somnia, which is eyeing "mass consumer applications" including gaming, social platforms and decentralized finance (DeFi).

The EVM-compatible blockchain will use the "breakthrough technology" of ICEdb, which Improbable claims delivers "ultra-fast read/write times," along with "advanced compression algorithms" that purport to transfer data between 10-20x more efficiently than other blockchains.

In initial testing with 100 validators, Somnia claims to have processed hundreds of thousands of EVM transactions per second on non-sharded data, leveraging "innovative compression strategies and a custom data ingestion layer" to minimize the bandwidth required for transaction data.

Improbable will contribute to the Somnia blockchain's "key technical components," while the project was initiated by the Virtual Society Foundation, an independent organization initiated by Improbable with initial funding from metaverse ecosystem MSquared (itself launched by Improbable in April 2023).

Virtual Society Foundation founder Paul Thomas said in a statement that, "Somnia's unprecedented blockchain capabilities are paving the way for real-time, mass-consumer applications."

Given Improbable's focus on the metaverse, it's unsurprising that Somnia's mission statement focuses on that particular application, with the blockchain aiming to create "A network of rich experiences, useful valuable virtual objects and sufficiently decentralized to allow people to build real companies without dependence on one big gaming business."

While the blockchain will initially focus on "gaming, metaverse, and social experiences," its creators wrote, it will ultimately have a broader range of use cases. "We are not even 100% certain of what can be built with the technology we are creating," they said.

What is Improbable?

Softbank-backed gaming startup Improbable is perhaps best known among the crypto community for its association with Bored Ape Yacht Club creator Yuga Labs, providing the technology for the NFT collection's Otherside metaverse project.

Following a $502 million Series B funding round in 2017, the firm achieved unicorn status with a valuation of more than $1 billion, raising an additional $262 million and reaching a $3.4 billion valuation by the end of 2022 in the wake of the metaverse boom.

The firm posted its first year of profit in 2023, having posted losses in the previous three financial years, after a round of belt-tightening that saw significant job cuts.

Edited by Stacy Elliott.