On-chain gaming engine MagicBlock completes $7.5 million seed round, led by Faction

On April 25, the on-chain game engine MagicBlock completed a $7.5 million seed round of financing, led by Faction, with participation from institutions such as Maven11, Mechanism Capital, Robot Ventures, Delphi Ventures, Equilibrium and Pivot Global, as well as angel investors such as Solana co-founder Toly, Helius Labs CEO Mert, and former Backpack co-founder Tristan Yver.

The following is the full official announcement:

At MagicBlock, our mission is simple: to enable developers to build fully on-chain, real-time applications on Solana without any compromise.

Today, we are pleased to announce that we have completed a $7.5 million seed round of financing to continue to push the limits of on-chain applications. The round was led by Lightspeed Faction, with participation from Maven11, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Equilibrium, Pivot Global, and a host of notable angel investors including Anatoly Yakovenko, Mert Mumtaz, and Tristan Yver.

This round brings our total raised to $10.5 million following our $3 million seed round led by a16z CSX in September 2024. This funding will enable us to scale our engineering team, grow our developer ecosystem, and double down on infrastructure support for the next generation of real-time, on-chain applications.

Why We Exist: Real-Time, Fully On-Chain

Real-time applications — whether gaming, trading, or messaging — have always struggled with blockchain latency. Appchains offer customization but destroy liquidity. L2s reduce fees but destroy composability. Builders are forced to compromise.

MagicBlock solves this problem.

With our Ephemeral Rollup technology, developers get ultra-low latency, elastic throughput, and fully native Solana composability. No bridges, no L2 tradeoffs. Just pure performance, built for the needs of fully on-chain applications.

Whether it’s streaming data, high-frequency trading, or multiplayer games, developers can now leverage Solana’s speed and liquidity while getting the real-time flexibility typically only available with centralized services.

Technology designed by builders, for builders

Our technology is led by co-founders Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco, who pioneered the concept of Ephemeral Rollups - a new execution layer on Solana that dynamically scales runtimes and plugins based on demand.

Instead of moving off-chain, applications stay in Solana and can call plugins like:

1ms real-time pricing streams

Custom ordering logic

Permissioned execution environment

This is a radical departure from traditional L2 thinking. Developers get the control they need without losing access to the Solana composable world.

Grow with the ecosystem

We don’t build in silos. We’ve already partnered with some of the most forward-thinking projects in the Solana ecosystem, including:

Lightning Trade: a decentralized derivatives exchange using our rollups for real-time, efficient trading

Supersize: an on-chain real-time multiplayer game designed for maximum verifiability and composability

dTelecom: decentralized voice and video powered by ad-hoc rollups for ultra-low latency

Pyth Lazer: delivering 1ms price feeds via MagicBlock runtime extensions

Jito: leveraging restaking to reduce execution times and increase security for validators

These collaborations are more than just integrations, they validate that we need infrastructure that meets modern user expectations.

Next Steps

We’re just getting started. With this new funding, we’ll:

Hiring more engineers to scale our runtime infrastructure

Expanding plugins to support more real-time use cases

Working with developers to launch applications that were previously impossible to run entirely on-chain

As co-founder Andrea Fortugno said:

Every developer wants to build on the fastest, most liquid blockchain — that’s Solana. But they also want the customizability and real-time performance of a Web2 server. With MagicBlock, they no longer have to choose.

If you’re building something that requires speed, composability, and real-time performance, we want to hear from you.

Let’s make Web3 feel like Web2, but without giving up its powerful features.