Case Study (Gaming): Eclipse x Worlds
Worlds announced the deployment of its own parallelized EVM rollup built with Eclipse, a customizable rollup provider that allows users to select their preferred parts of various blockchains, using Celestia as a base layer for data availability. With Polychain backing, Worlds is building a first-person shooter game and a range of gaming infrastructure.
Worlds wanted a chain that satisfied the requirements specific to multiplayer gaming: ✅ Support for 1000s of concurrent users ✅ Extremely low latency ✅ Near-free transaction costs
Although Worlds’ platform can execute EVM bytecode, it uses the Sealevel virtual machine (SVM) underneath. The chain employs Neon EVM, which utilizes proxy nodes to relay EVM transactions to the SVM. Within the SVM, an EVM bytecode interpreter called Sputnik VM executes the EVM transaction, and the EVM state is stored in SVM accounts to maximize SVM parallelism.
SVM parallelism requires indicating which accounts are read or written to upfront. With this information, the SVM can allow parallel processing where there are no race conditions (ex: many accounts can be concurrently read from at the same time). For Neon EVM transactions, we can either provide this account information upfront in cases where quick confirmation times are important, or the Neon EVM proxy can execute the transaction locally to gather this information prior to sending the transaction to the SVM.
Once a block of transactions is executed, it is posted to Celestia for data availability.
As a result, users get the convenience of EVM wallets and tooling while benefiting from the speed of the SVM.
Worlds wanted a chain that satisfied the requirements specific to multiplayer gaming
- Support for 1000s of concurrent users
- Extremely low latency
- Near-free transaction costs
If Worlds were to create a customized Layer 1 or Layer 2 blockchain to satisfy their specifications, they would need to employ a team of infrastructure experts and SREs to ensure uptime and ongoing chain upgrades. With Eclipse, however, Worlds was able to specify their customized chain requirements and build their rollup. This allowed Worlds to take advantage of 2,000+ TPS for itself, enabling novel game mechanics at scale.
In future deployments of the Worlds chain, the Worlds team can add in functionality including:
💵 Gasless transactions & gas abstraction
0️⃣ Transition to a zero-knowledge rollup using Eclipse's @RiscZero zk-VM
✍️ Financialization and custom instructions specific to the game