The Layer-1 protocol Saga is launching Saga Mainnet Phase One, the beginning of transactions on a blockchain that has more than 350 projects.
This release underscores Saga’s commitment to revamping Web3 infrastructure, offering accessibility, user-friendliness, and scalability. Many of the projects on the network will be games, and Saga promises them negligible gas fees, or computing transaction costs, and a user-friendly experience.
Saga recently announced its Saga Origins division to publish unconventional games. Of the 350 projects, roughly 200 are games. And of the day one launches, about 70% or 80% are games, said Rebecca Liao, CEO of Saga, in an interview with GamesBeat.
As a Layer-1 protocol designed to facilitate the launch of other Layer-1s, Saga Mainnet empowers developers to build applications with mass adoption in mind, leveraging the ability to scale infrastructure infinitely while maintaining a seamless user experience, the company said. Much of the mainnet work has been happening since December, said Liao.
The arrival of Saga Mainnet introduces features, including infinite horizontal scalability, costless transactions, fast bridging and interoperability, and fully flexible stack options. This approach enables developers to elastically scale their applications to peak performance and speed.
Over 100 of the partners have joined Saga in this monumental Mainnet launch, including notable names like Another World, Rogue Nation, and Ethernity. These partners bring a wealth of expertise and diverse perspectives to the Saga ecosystem.
Rebecca Liao, CEO of Saga, said in a statement, “Our Saga Mainnet has been a labor of love, and this launch sees our dreams of creating the best possible platform for game developers come to fruition. This achievement is a testament to the collaborative efforts of our extensive network of partners, our vibrant Saganaut community, and our talented game developers.”
Saga has strategic partnerships with entities such as Polygon, Avalanche, Celestia, Netmarble, and Com2Us underscore its commitment to innovation and collaboration. These partnerships bring unique solutions and capabilities to Saga’s ecosystem, further enhancing its scalability and versatility.
Jin Kwon, chief strategy officer at Saga, highlighted the unique features of Saga’s tech, saying in a statement, “We’re excited to offer developers features that are only available on our Saga chain. From costless transactions to dynamic sharding of game state, Saga empowers creators to focus on building their games without worrying about back-end systems.”
The recent launch of Saga Origins, its game publishing arm, further solidifies Saga’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of gaming and Web3 experiences, the company said.
A lot of attention
The 350 projects will grow in number throughout the year, Liao said. The company has around 20 people and it has raised $15 million so far. But there is something small but mighty going on here.
So far, the Saga community has been very excited and active about the launch, Liao said.
“We put in a lot of hard work into this innovative program where all the projects are housed. We had a very successful Air Drop campaign. We knew that we were going to get listed on Binance (the biggest cryptocurrency exchange),” Liao said. “So certain things we expected. But the reception since announcing our mainnet launch dates and the Binance listing have been incredible. So we broke the record late last week for value stakes on a Binance launch pool. I believe now it’s $13 billion or $14 billion. And I over the weekend, we broke the record for the number of participants in a Binance launch pool as well.”
The launch pool is a program for new listings, where they give people an opportunity to stake the BNB token to get rewards. For the token that’s listing in this case, it’s Saga. So launch pool participation is a proxy, in other words, for how valuable people think the token might be, and just how popular the project is.
“So seeing us break records on two fronts there, it was extremely exciting for the team,” Liao said.
Liao said she believes the mainnet launch has drawn a lot of attention in part because there are so many partners. About 100 of them are launching something right away.
“I think that the saga message hit at the right time, or what we’re building hit at the right time. So gaming has been really getting momentum this year in crypto. That has been very helpful. We always wanted to build for mass adoption,” Liao said. “So when consumers really come into crypto, we want to make sure the infrastructure can actually hold up to that kind of traffic. And I don’t think it was until recently that people understood that a system doesn’t just have to be fast and cheap. It also has to scale. It has to really hold up under the pressure of that kind of user activity. Saga’s system is infinitely horizontally scalable. I think these were messages that the market was finally ready to hear.”
Saga makes money through the value of its token. Developers pay validators to keep their chain functioning. The more chainlets there are, the more people will use the login token. And then the value of the token would reflect that activity. Saga will also get a cut of game revenue once it starts publishing games in the future. And there will likely be a marketplace platform in the future, where developers can swap out components of the Saga stack and there could be a rev share as a result.
Origins and tech
Saga was founded in 2022, relatively late in the history of blockchains but focused on doing things other blockchains haven’t done before. One of those is infinite horizontal scalability, which means all chainlets are parallelized appchain instances, allowing applications to elastically scale to their peak performance and speed. It also focuses on costless transactions and low and predictable chain fees.
App makers can choose whatever monetization model, including a token of their own (or no token at all), fiat, stablecoin or even the token of another ecosystem. All Chainlet fees are set by a daily reverse auction among the validators, encouraging commodity pricing for blockspace.
And it focuses on automation. Devs can stand up a chainlet via one click button in the Saga WebApp.
It also offers interoperability and fast bridging to freely and quickly transfer assets between chainlets — and Saga and other ecosystems — using automatic interoperability and async composability. Each Chainlet offers fast finality of transactions, users can also take advantage of fast bridging out to other chains.
Saga has strategic partnerships that include automating the instantiation of Supernets, Polygon’s appchain solution; providing a software stack that further automates the instantiation of Avalanche’s appchain solution; collaborating with Celestia to implement sequencers-as-a-service to scale rollups; empowering Netmarble’s web3 division MarbleX to leverage Saga’s unique infrastructure, addressing the critical scale required for its global gaming market; and providing scaling infrastructure to the Com2uS chain.
Today’s launch completes a long journey of development over the last two years culminating with Mainnet. Phase One brings Saga’s security and platform chains online, with the latter serving as the destination where developers launch and maintain their chainlets.
Saga executed a rigorous and successful testnet named Pegasus in October 2023 which resulted in over 200 new chainlets and encountered more than 14.5 million wallets addresses, and the number of transactions exceeded 59 million. Saga is multi-chain natively, and you can program in any language, Liao said.
Liao said Saga tries to team up with competitors and turn them into partners. That’s what it did with Avalanche and Polygon. Avalanche’s subnets are similar in concept to Saga’s chainlets, but the Saga chainlets can be automatically created. Saga is unique in that it can automate the creation of the chainlets, rather than do it manually. That’s a problem that Cosmos has been working on for many years. Saga did an Air Drop to the Avalanche community.
“We’re just very grateful. And we look forward to over 100 day one launch partners,” Liao said.
Saga’s 100 partners will likely air drop tokens and NFTs to Saga stakers.
“It’s the broadest based drop that any chain has ever done,” Liao said. “And this will be a combination, not just of new projects where the tokens are brand new or unlisted. It will also be for projects whose tokens are already live. So they are listed. There is a public value to them. People can easily judge how much value the air drop is. So the whole space is really coming together for this launch. And it’s just been incredible.”