Web3 game and creator platform Hytopia has announced it’s migrating its L2 Hytopia Chain from Polygon to Arbitrum. Following two years of building and undergoing a complete rebranding from previously called NFT Worlds, Hytopia launched mainnet on Polygon in October 2023. In that regard, the move comes as somewhat of a surprise.
We got in touch with the team behind this Minecraft-inspired game platform to discuss the underlying reason for its migration, what practical improvements users can expect and what’s on offer for Hytopia partner games.
The questions were answered by Hytopia co-founder and spokesman ArkDev.
BlockchainGamer.biz: What sparked your decision to migrate to Arbitrum?
ArkDev: Arbitrum continues to be a leader in their advancement of technologies powering rollups. When they opened up their AnyTrust/Nitro stacks as options to power an L2/L3, we kept our eyes on it.
In December, Polygon dropped their continued support of their Polygon Edge software which we had previously launched our mainnet with, pushing us into a position where we would be left to solely make any fixes or improvements as needed over time due to Polygon no longer continuing development of edge – as a game and platform focused company, we’d prefer to leave low level infrastructure details to a partner with a proven track record and continued development and support of their provided technologies.
Player and creator actions tied to on-chain transactions, content purchases and trades will process at a perceived speed of >50% faster over Polygon’s technology.
The combination of Arbitrum’s continued advancements, and dropped support of Edge by Polygon were enough for us to decide to make the switch.
What will Arbitrum provide that Polygon didn’t?
Arbitrum’s AnyTrust/Nitro technology provides a number of meaningful improvements over Polygon Edge. The primary ones being
- 50%~ reduction in block times. Where our L2 utilizing Polygon’s technology was limited to a 1.1s~ block time, with AnyTrust we have 250ms to 500ms block times.
- Optimistic block production – this means that chain state is not bloated with empty blocks continually being produced. Blocks are only produced when there are transactions that need processing.
On a practical level, will there be any noticable difference to your players and creators following the migration?
Yes! Arbitrum’s AnyTrust stack will allow us to further reduce block times. This means player and creator actions tied to on-chain transactions, content purchases and trades will process at a perceived speed of >50% faster over Polygon’s technology.
In game situations where many on-chain actions may need to take place in a short period of time, or a player is actively engaging in many purchasing or selling transactions per minute, this overall speed improvement is critical for a smooth experience.
With a lot happening in 2023 – rebranding, building and laying the foundations for your ecosystem – what’s your main focus for 2024?
2024 is heavily focused on two areas:
- The launch and growth of our game partners ecosystem through HYCHAIN, where the technologies we’ve built for frictionless web3 games over the last 2 years is freely given to our partners. This includes much of our account abstraction infrastructure, cash onramps, merging of our web3 games infrastructure company MetaFab, and more.
- The launch of HYTOPIA, our creator platform heavily focused on being a cross between Roblox and Minecraft, with blockchain powering the underlying economy layer and USDC denominated content and trading marketplaces. To date we have over 3,000 content creators and developers from the Minecraft ecosystem ready to build on HYTOPIA and over 1,100,000 pre-registered players waiting for our beta.
As per the announcement, a core focus for the team is on expanding its tech stack to partner games. In addition to faster and gasless transactions, the switch aims to enable smoother interoperability of player assets and provide an Ethereum-Hytopia bridge.
Moreover, the integration of Hytopia’s web3 infrastructure solution MetaFab is aimed at providing quicker game launches on the Hytopia Chain. In conjunction with the migration, MetaFab is also likely to transition from being completely open-sourced in an attempt to drive more utility to the Hytopia ecosystem.
Following the migration, games of significant size on the L2 chain will also be offered to transition to a Hytopia L3 app-chain specific to their game and Hytopia’s node operators will be rewarded for operating a node.
In closing, the company has also announced it will undergo a significant restructure and separate its games division from the game development team. Going forward the two will have completely separate funds.
Stay up-to-date via the Hytopia website.
Comments are closed.