Improbable, the Company Building Yuga Labs’ Otherside, to Launch Somnia Blockchain DevNet Phase

Improbable, the British metaverse technology company creating Yuga Labs’ Otherside platform, has said the Somnia blockchain will enter its DevNet phase in the coming weeks.

The blockchain will process over 400,000 transactions per second (TPS) with sub-second latency and low fees, as well as being Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) compatible, according to Improbable.

“The blockchain [will] enable very, very high transaction throughput and the ability to put more things on-chain,” Improbable co-founder and CEO Herman Narula told CoinDesk.

“Over the last 10 years, no one has managed to build a high-performance blockchain. I think the incentives in the space have really skewed people towards short term wins, pumping tokens [and] not actually solving real problems,” he said, adding that average transaction volumes on some chains are in the single digits.

The project is spearheaded by the Virtual Society Foundation, which Improbable helped to initiate in March this year. It is funded by Improbable’s M2, a network of interoperable metaverses backed by investors such as a16z and SoftBank.

He said his team had spent the last two years researching and building new technology that allows for hundreds of thousands of transactions a second, which is “really essential for building any kind of real applications.”

In a tweet thread earlier this year, Narula said the industry needs a better layer one to build real metaverses at consumer scale.

He used the analogy of a restaurant to explain the current challenges. “Parallel execution means more waiters so more tables can be served, that’s fine unless everyone’s orders start referring to everyone else’s orders… then things go horribly wrong. This needs a very different solution, one that is surprisingly similar to what we needed to do to handle billions of movement updates when a crowd exists in a single spot.” he said.

“Therefore our plan is not more waiters… to use a non technical analogy, we intend to give a single waiter a whole bunch of drugs to make them go faster… In conclusion, Somnia: Let’s give the EVM crack.”