Quick Take
- Gaming workloads dwarf financial apps in transaction demand, says Somnia founder Paul Thomas
- Somnia built its stack from scratch to meet real-time, on-chain compute at scale
- Multi-stream consensus and a custom database enable over 1 million TPS with public internet reliability
During a recent conversation with GlobalStake, Somnia founder Paul Thomas explained why gaming sits at the center of the project’s design decisions. Joined by Ryan Haczynski and Myles Jackson, the session focused on the demands that interactive entertainment places on infrastructure and the reasons Somnia was built to meet them.
Gaming has become one of the largest entertainment sectors by volume and user engagement. Thomas pointed to the number of transactions that even mid-scale virtual worlds generate daily. These workloads include not just payments or trades but the full range of in-game actions and logic that make digital environments feel alive.
Somnia was built with this intensity in mind. Every layer of its stack was rewritten to handle real-time interaction, from the execution engine down to data synchronization. The chain uses a custom EVM compiler that translates bytecode to native machine code. This eliminates interpretation overhead and supports fast, deterministic processing of game logic.
Its database, called ICB, was also designed in-house. Traditional blockchain databases were not structured for the type of read/write caching needed in active multiplayer systems. Somnia’s storage engine was optimized for quick access to changing state, helping reduce latency and support frequent updates from live users.
Consensus follows a new model. Somnia’s multi-stream consensus lets each validator operate its own data chain, with a shared consensus chain coordinating updates between them. This setup allows for high throughput without sacrificing consistency across the network. It draws from a model first outlined in the Autobahn BFT paper, which was also recently adopted by teams working on other infrastructure projects.
Networking was another challenge. To move large amounts of data between nodes over public internet infrastructure, Somnia developed a compression system tuned specifically for blockchain workloads. This ensures validators can remain in sync without consuming unsustainable bandwidth.
Thomas described the network as a platform for high-throughput applications that need reliable compute and state tracking. Gaming fits that profile. Every movement, event, and interaction can trigger on-chain updates, and the system needs to respond without delay.
Somnia’s ecosystem has started to reflect that ambition. More than 60 game projects are currently active on its testnet. The network has recorded over one billion transactions to date. Tools like Gamers L.A.B., built by Uprising Labs, are being used to log match outcomes, kill counts, and milestone events directly to the chain. Those records become usable across reward systems, quests, and community tools.
Somnia also partnered with Google Cloud, which now operates as a validator on the network and provides AI infrastructure for agent-based gameplay and analytics. The integration gives developers access to BigQuery, Mandiant security tools, and AI agent deployment pipelines. These services are being used to build adaptive non-player characters, dynamic in-game markets, and content personalization.
At the Proof of Talk summit in Paris, Thomas described the long-term goal as an invisible blockchain layer. He outlined a path where users can interact with applications without signing transactions, managing wallets, or navigating bridges. Somnia is working on account abstraction and smart gas tooling to support that.
Projects like Chunked and FanFree are early examples of this design in action. Gameplay, identity, and progress are tracked on-chain, but the blockchain layer remains hidden during interaction. The approach aims to make Web3 gaming accessible to larger audiences without introducing onboarding friction.
Thomas described Somnia as a system meant to support persistent, composable digital experiences at scale. With testnet adoption growing and new infrastructure going live, the chain is positioning itself as a base layer for games that run continuously, generate data constantly, and rely on infrastructure that can keep up with both.
