Mirror World CEO shares insights on building a Solana game engine after securing $12M raise

Despite the blockchain's soaring popularity, there is a chronic "lack of infrastructure" for developers to build games on Solana, at least according to Mirror World CEO Chris Zhu.

In an interview with Cointelegraph, Zhu stated that certain DeFi features taken for granted on other blockchains, such as cross-chain swaps and on/off crypto ramps, are simply out of reach for Solana gaming developers. "For example, applications like games find it challenging to internalize value on a shared Solana layer not designed with just one application in mind," said Zhu, continuing: "Specific applications may require custom features such as Privacy, Instant settlements, Asset transfer rules and compliance which were not supported."

To combat this problem, a few days prior, Solana gaming studio Mirror World Labs raised $12 million in its inaugural Series A funding led by Bitkraft, Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and others to further the development of its gaming rollup, Sonic, which launched back in March .

Zhu says that thus far, developers have been receptive to Sonic's technical capacity. "However, some of their feedback was to have the main token liquidity on Solana mainnet," he said. "Which is why we enabled atomic interoperability. Leveraging HyperGrid Framework (a rollup deployment kit that allows developers to deploy new game engines and virtual machines within the Solana environment), games can utilize atomic interoperability, which allows liquidity to remain on the mainnet while processing game logic on Sonic."

Currently, Mirror World is targeting a controlled aggregated transaction settlement of 12,000,000 transactions per second on Sonic and HyperGrid, which would support a variety of multi-player real-time gaming transactions such as inventory purchases, quest drops, and more.

"In order to achieve this, we also needed to work directly with Solana validators to prioritize and submit our transactions - which is where our investor Galaxy Interactive has been playing a big role, as the largest validator on Solana," Zhu said.

Cointelegraph: Looking ahead, what are the key milestones and new features that Mirror World plans to introduce to further support and expand the Solana gaming ecosystem?

Chris Zhu: As a layer-two blockchain, we are actively expanding all the relevant components to build out a healthy, sustainable, and growing ecosystem. This not only includes gaming studios, but all the infrastructure projects to enable and bring in liquidity, such as NFT marketplaces, DEXes, staking protocols, etc. Additionally, we are positioned to be the gaming hub of Solana - supporting our gaming studios on all fronts, including go-to-market support, regional marketing, partnership collaboration, KOL engagements, and more to maximize the growth of our ecosystem games.

Currently, Sonic remains the only software development kit (SDK) on Solana. Its closest competitor, Eclipse, instead seeks to build a Solana Virtual Machine later-two on Ethereum, and not a Solana-native SDK on its own blockchain. "There is also Ronin (Web3 Games) and Redstone (FOCG), which is the leading gaming chain on top of Ethereum, but we aim to bring gaming assets and developers that want to build on Solana Virtual Machine," Zhu commented.

Mirror World developers told Cointelegraph previously that while Solana has benefited from the memecoin boom and decentralized application market growth, its gaming aspect “has not seen similar levels of success.” They believe that the novel Sonic protocol could help other devs in deploying Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains to support their own GameFi projects.

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