Alongside its oft-quoted “1 million transactions per second” tag, new blockchain Somnia now has another big number to hype.
It claims to have broken the record for the most onchain transactions in one day handled by an EVM-compatible L1 blockchain – 80 million – which brings its total transactions to over 1 billion.
Of course, it’s worth pointing out that Somnia is still running on its Shannon testnet, with its mainnet not due to go live until later in 2025.
Still, given it’s selling itself on performance, its 80 million transactions in a day compares favourably to Ethereum’s peak of 1.9 million transactions in a day and Solana’s 66.9 million record.
One of the key drivers of this recent spike in activity is its fully-onchain-Minecraft game Chunked, which is expected to launch its version 2 test shortly. Combining the Somnia blockchain with the MSquared metaverse platform, it generated 250 million transactions during season 1, also handling over 70,000 concurrent users.
“Reaching one billion transactions on Somnia validates our core belief, that the future of digital experiences demands seamless interconnection, real-time performance, and freedom from traditional barriers,” said Somnia co-founder Paul Thomas.
“Somnia’s ecosystem of partners and passionate community are really the stars behind this achievement for us. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to claim such progress and they are the reason we do what we do. Reaching this milestone is a testament to the demand for blockchain tech that works, and we’ll continue to strive to build what matters for them.”
Focused on enabling developers to put their logic and lots of data onchain, Somnia is particularly focusing on games. It recently announced that sports brawler Sparkball was moving to Somnia. The game originally announced for Solana and was then going to go live on Monad before Somnia made it an offer it couldn’t refuse.
Other games that are now Somnia-bound include roguelike RPG Variance, CCG DarkTable and survival game NightSpawn. It’s also launched two incubation programs. One with Uprising Games is deploying $10 million in grants to bring web2 games to web3, while its Dream Catalyst project is supporting games, metaverse, DeFi and social apps with another $10 million grant pool.
“Somnia isn’t just building for crypto enthusiasts, it’s building for mass-market digital experiences. Blockchain can no longer be treated as a data store, it’s a whole operating system and needs to be able to handle the millions of users that are due to come onchain. This is what Somnia delivers,” added Somnia co-founder Herman Narula.
Find out more at the Somnia website.