The blockchain sector continues to soar in popularity, but developers building games on Solana face significant challenges. Chris Zhu, CEO of Mirror World, highlighted a chronic "lack of infrastructure" for game development on Solana during an interview with Cointelegraph.

Unmet DeFi Needs

In the interview, Zhu pointed out that certain DeFi features, taken for granted on other blockchains, are complex for Solana gaming developers to access. Cross-chain swaps and on/off crypto ramps are particularly challenging.

"Applications like games find it challenging to internalize value on a shared Solana layer not designed with just one application in mind," Zhu explained. He emphasized that specific applications may require custom features like privacy, instant settlements, and asset transfer rules, which are currently unsupported.

Funding Boost

Mirror World Labs recently raised $12 million in its inaugural Series A funding to address these issues. Bitkraft, Galaxy Interactive, Big Brain Holdings, and others led the round. This funding aims to further the development of its gaming rollup, Sonic, which launched in March.

Zhu noted that developers have been receptive to Sonic's technical capabilities. "Some of their feedback was to have the main token liquidity on Solana mainnet," he said.

To meet this demand, Mirror World enabled atomic interoperability. By leveraging the HyperGrid Framework, a rollup deployment kit, games can keep liquidity on the mainnet while processing game logic on Sonic.

Scaling Ambitions

Mirror World targets a controlled aggregated transaction settlement of 12,000,000 transactions per second on Sonic and HyperGrid. This high transaction rate supports multi-player real-time gaming transactions, such as inventory purchases and quest drops.

"To achieve this, we also needed to work directly with Solana validators to prioritize and submit our transactions," Zhu said. Investor Galaxy Interactive, the largest validator on Solana, plays a significant role in this collaboration.

Future Plans

Looking ahead, Mirror World plans to introduce new features to support and expand the Solana gaming ecosystem. "As a layer-two blockchain, we are actively expanding all the relevant components to build out a healthy, sustainable, and growing ecosystem," Zhu said.

This expansion includes gaming studios and infrastructure projects to bring liquidity, such as NFT marketplaces, DEXes, and staking protocols.

Mirror World aims to become Solana's gaming hub, supporting studios with go-to-market strategies, regional marketing, partnership collaborations, and more.

Currently, Sonic remains Solana's only software development kit (SDK). Its closest competitor, Eclipse, aims to build a Solana Virtual Machine later-two on Ethereum, not a Solana-native SDK. Other competitors include Ronin (Web3 Games) and Redstone (FOCG), which are leading gaming chains on Ethereum.

Mirror World developers believe that the Sonic protocol could help other developers deploy Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) chains to support their GameFi projects. ç

"The gaming aspect of Solana has not seen similar levels of success," they noted, but the novel Sonic protocol could change that.