🧵 Which Chain Will Win Onchain Gaming? A Dev’s View After 3 Weeks of Building and Researching

🎮 Been prototyping a fast-paced FPS game. Wanted to see if it’s even feasible to run something this responsive onchain. Spent 3 weeks testing stacks across ecosystems. Here’s the reality.

⛓️ EVM Chains (Optimism, Base, Arbitrum, Somnia)
They’re optimized for DeFi: great for slow games like idle battlers or turn-based strategy.

🧪 Infecteddotfun on Base was a important issue for me, cuz the game was lit, everybody plated it but gameplay lagged under load. That’s the ceiling right now.

Verdict: Fine for some games. But once there is a load, the TPS and latency can’t handle it. The game can’t feel real-time? meaning if you were to play CSGO onchain, you would get 400ms in fastest option which is Solana. But there are solutions competing to win the gaming onchain. Here’s what I think about them:

🔬 Starknet + ZK Rollups
The tech is powerful. Composability is elegant. Verifiability is clean. But dev tools are heavy, and there’s almost zero precedent for fast, live games. Still early. Still infra-first.

Verdict: Long-term potential. Too slow to build on today.

🌐 Solana L2s (Sonic, StarAtlas)
Purpose-built, high throughput, low fees. But… they run on separate chains. That means no native access to Solana’s assets, liquidity, or dev infra. It’s L2 in all the ways that make devs sweat. + Solana L1 is way too aggressive on L2s, I’d never want to go L2 on Solana.

⚡ Solana L1
Faster than anything else in L1 land. Great support, great builders, tools feel polished. But at 400ms block time, it still lags for anything PvP or input-sensitive. It’s almost enough. But almost isn’t playable.

Verdict: Best general-purpose base chain. Needs acceleration for twitch gameplay.

What saved me, and actually helped me build my game onchain was: Magicblock on Solana
This is where it clicked. Its a rollup, I get to take advantage of Solana at fullest, and don’t go over problems like infecteddotfun had on Base.

Verdict: Only model that hits real-time latency and preserves Solana’s composability.

🧠 So who wins onchain gaming?
Depends what you’re building:

• If it’s slow or financial: EVM rollups work
• If it’s ZK-heavy or turn-based: Starknet might shine
• If it’s closed-world MMO: Sonic or custom L2s fit
• If it’s real-time, open-state gameplay? Solana + Magicblock is the only way I’ve seen it actually run

💬 Devs, ask yourself:

• Are you building games, or platforms for other devs?
• What matters more instant sync, or local responsiveness?
• If composability could be async but verifiable, would you use it?

💬 Community, ask yourself:

• What chain will conquer onchain gaming?
• Why is it important to consider where onchain gaming is moving towards to?
• Think about playing Roblox onchain, that will change the way we interact with the world. We’ll earn money/token by playing real life feeling games.

Let’s talk. Wanna see everyone’s thoughts.