About

At Lattice we are building full stack, from games and worlds to infrastructure and tools to make autonomous worlds a reality. We are building MUD, an open-source operating system for developing autonomous worlds and other onchain applications, Redstone, a home for autonomous worlds, and Sky Strife a fully onchain real-time strategy game. You can learn more about our history below.

In 2022, we launched OPCraft, a fully-onchain procedurally-generated voxel game that attracted over 1,500 unique players who submitted 3.5 million transactions over the course of ten days. OPCraft was built by Lattice in just 1.5 months using MUD v1, an early version of our operating system. You can learn more about OPCraft here, here, and here.

HISTORY
Prehistory
spring 2021

In 2020 and 2021, Ethereum and the applications built on top of it were growing increasingly sophisticated, but there were major gaps in both developer tooling and the kinds of projects that were being deployed. DeFi was growing, NFTs were in their nascency, but there were few applications that were forums for play, emergent behavior, or the kind of complexity that could one day give rise to autonomous worlds. Ethereum was becoming the world’s financial computer, but was it becoming the world computer?

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Amid this period of contentious DeFi forks, yield farming, and early games that incorporated NFTs, a new experiment arose. This experiment was called Dark Forest, and it was unlike anything that had been deployed on the EVM before. Dark Forest was the first fully onchain game — the game logic, and all of its data was written onchain, and game state could be derived from chain history. No servers, no intermediaries, just pure groundtruth, facilitated by the blockchain and accessible to anyone. Dark Forest also was the first game to use zkSNARKs to create an incomplete information game onchain.

Dark Forest attracted hundreds of players, who were intrigued first by the gameplay, but then began building clients and plugins for the game itself. There were marketplaces for in-game NFTs, plugins to automatically schedule moves, a “remote snarker” which sped up the rate a player could hash unknown parts of the map, an exchange that permitted users to reveal the location of one of their Dark Forest planets every day, in exchange for bounties, and dozens of other community-created augmentations to the core game. Dark Forest was becoming a complex, emergent network.

In 2020, Lattice’s founder, Ludens, sent a message to a stranger named Gubsheep, one of the developers behind the game.

Luden's Tweet

Soon, Ludens was on his way to Mexico, where he began collaborating with the Dark Forest team. It was the beginning of the ideas and challenges that would give rise to Lattice and MUD.

Signs of life
summer - winter 2021

In the Summer of 2021, Ludens wanted to make a new game. He was joined by Alvarius, and the two got to work on zkDungeon, an onchain game that was a cross between a board game and a battle royale. After months of tireless iteration, the team had a working demo running.

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ZK Dungeon

But, there were problems. At the time, Ethereum developer tooling wasn’t equipped to handle ambitious applications. Ludens and Alvarius wanted developers building clients and plugins on top of zkDungeon to have a seamless and intuitive experience — but there was no framework that made contributions to the world approachable. Something needed to change.

The Breakthrough, and the Birth of Lattice and MUD
spring - summer 2022

Ludens and Alvarius, with the help of other collaborators, realized that they needed to build an operating system before they could launch a game. They needed a framework and a protocol to handle the inevitable complexity of game code, and to counteract the developer-unfriendly patterns inherent in the way smart contracts are traditionally written. After exploring numerous frameworks for game development, the team discovered the ECS (Entity, Component, System) pattern, which became the foundation on which MUD v1, the team’s game engine, was formed.

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In the spring of 2022, at the D.E.F.C.O.N. conference in Amsterdam, Ludens announced Lattice, the company and Alvarius introduced MUD and the ECS framework in more detail. Soon, Lattice was joined by Kooshaba, one of the core developers on the Dark Forest team, and Biscaryn, who came aboard as our Chief-of-Staff. In the Summer of 2022, we officially incorporated. That Summer, the team began a full sprint on developing MUD. We held a summit in NYC, began developing the chains, infrastructure, and services that would become the MUD testnet and MODE, and also started hacking on a game called MUD War, which would eventually become Sky Strife. In August 2022, Ludens published Autonomous Worlds (Part 1) which would become the touchstone for any team looking to build complex, emergent systems on Ethereum.

Cloud

Early Skystrife

MUD Goes Primetime
fall - winter 2022

In the Fall of 2022, with MUD v1 in a relatively stable state, we invited over a dozen teams to London, to participate in a residency focused on building games and applications using MUD. We were blown away by the complexity and innovation that we saw. Our intuition around the need for a robust operating system to enable onchain applications was validated.

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MUD v1 Games

In-house, the Lattice team was hard at work on a new game called OPCraft, a voxel-based onchain game that pushed the limits of both MUD, and Optimism, the EVM-equivalent rollup upon which OPCraft was deployed. In the ten days that OPCraft was live, the game played host to emergent life onchain — new plugins, custom smart contracts, and even a Supreme Leader, all surfaced when the game was live.

OPCraft

In October 2022, at Devcon in Bogota, the team debuted MUD v1 for a mass audience. Directly after, we held an 80-person Autonomous Worlds Symposium to demonstrate the capabilities on MUD v1 in more detail. In November, Frolic, one of the most prolific plugin-builders on OPCraft, joined the Lattice team full-time.

Growing Lattice
spring - summer 2023

In the new year, we welcomed seven more people to the team, across Engineering, Operations, and Product Management. Sky Strife development hit a stride, and we launched new tutorials for MUD to give new developers an easy point of entry to the MUD ecosystem.

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Our focus intensified on improving MUD, and we began building out features to bring MUD v2 to a stable state. MUD v2 is a modularization across the entire stack: we modularized our data model to bypass Solidity’s compiler-driven data storage. We modularized our plugin system, to give developers flexibility in how they use MUD. We modularized our sync stack, to allow for synchronizing contract and client state, with support for querying the client and our automatic indexer, MODE, in SQL. Our MUD v2 feedback loop was informed by our own work on Sky Strife, and by needs of those building applications using MUD. You can read more about the process here.

In Spring 2023, we partnered with ETHGlobal where we saw over 400 hackers submit over 100 different projects, built on MUD v2. We continue to work on MUD v2, as well as many internal initiatives related to EVM infrastructure. We also began to prepare MUD v2 for an audit, which we commenced with Open Zeppelin.

Forging Redstone
fall 2023 - winter 2024

With MUD reaching stability, more ambitious onchain applications began to proliferate. Teams like Primodium, Small Brain Games, our in-house game Sky Strife, and more were deploying on testnets and L2s with more regularity. But state growth in MUD worlds, and data-intensive transactions in many applications made us observe that even L2’s may not support MUD apps in the long-term.

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Behind the scenes, we were working on our own solution to this problem. As early as 2022, we began researching ways to scale transactions in MUD worlds. At Devconnect in 2023, this culminated with the launch of Redstone, a Plasma-inspired L2 built on the OP Stack, which prioritizes cost-effectiveness, and achieves it through offchain data-availability. You can read more about the history of Redstone here.

With Redstone, we support autonomous worlds that want to scale effectively. Redstone also represents and expansion of Lattice’s engineering efforts. With the MUD engine, we built software for the EVM, and Redstone is the beginning of our expansion into EVM hardware. Redstone cover page

Audits, Launches, and More
Spring 2024 - Present

Before the launch of Redstone in May 2024, we knew that MUD v2 would need to be audited; after all, how could you have apps running on mainnet if the underlying framework on which they were built wasn’t battle-tested? In February 2024, we announced the completion of our audit with Open Zeppelin, and we followed up with a blogpost detailing MUD v2’s contract and client-side features.

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Shortly after the completion of the audit, we were also proud to share the news that CCP Games, the team behind the well-known MMO EVE Online, had chosen MUD as the framework to build their upcoming onchain game Project Awakening. We continue to work closely with the CCP team as they develop Project Awakening and work to realize the autonomous worlds vision.

In April 2024, we announced the Race to Mainnet, a monthlong lead-up to the launch of Redstone mainnet. In that time, we worked with ten different teams building onchain projects, including MUD builders like Small Brain Games, who we first met back in our Fall 2022 residency. It was truly a full-circle moment. When Redstone launched on May 1st 2024, we ran a 15-day long Worlds Expo, showcasing the nascent autonomous worlds percolating on Redstone, and highlighted our engineering contributions to the OP Stack.

For us, this was just the beginning. In the coming months, the team is hyper-focused on building out support for modding MUD projects, and continuing to foster autonomous worlds on Redstone.

FAQS
What is Lattice?

At Lattice we are building full stack, from games and worlds to infrastructure and tools to make autonomous worlds a reality. You can learn more about our history in the section above.

What is MUD?

MUD is an operating system for developing autonomous worlds and complex onchain applications on any EVM-based blockchain. MUD is a departure from traditional patterns in writing smart contracts, and was developed in response to a number of observations around the difficulty of developing onchain applications today. Unlike traditional smart contracts, MUD enforces a separation of state (saved in Store, and acting as a replacement for Solidity compiler-driven data storage) and logic (which is defined using Systems, and reads and writes to the Store).

Additionally, MUD comes with an automatic indexer for applications designed using MUD. Unlike traditional applications which must be written with view functions, custom indexers, and subgraphs in mind, our indexer automatically works with any MUD application, allowing anyone to easily query state and sync with the network. MUD also introduces World, which is how we orchestrate new applications built using MUD. World is a new network where you (or anyone else) can deploy state and logic.

What’s the best way to learn more about MUD?

To get started, read our documentation and walk through our tutorials, all of which are designed to get you up and developing using MUD. We also have a number of tutorial videos on our YouTube channel. The best place to ask questions or view questions from other developers in the community is our Discord channel.

Who should build on MUD?

Anyone looking to build autonomous worlds and push the limits of what can be done onchain today.

Who’s building on MUD today?

In addition to projects like the onchain RTS game Sky Strife which is developed in-house at Lattice, there are dozens of different games and applications in development today. Highlights include projects from teams like Biomes, Small Brain Games, Primodium, Moving Castles, and Project Awakening by CCP Games, the team behind the popular MMO EVE Online.

I’d like to contribute to MUD. what should I do?

We have a strong and open developer ecosystem around MUD. If you’d like to start contributing, we keep a list of good low-hanging first PRs to get you started. If you’re interested in making a PR to the MUD codebase, we suggest you fork the repo, push to your fork, and then open a PR from that fork to the main repo. Feel free to reach out on Discord if you have any questions. If you’d like to become a MUD Core Developer, reach out to someone on the team on Discord.

What is Redstone?

Redstone is a home for autonomous worlds. It's a Plasma-inspired L2 that is designed from the ground up to make onchain worlds accessible, scalable, and cheap. Instead of storing data onchain, Redstone posts data commitment hashes to mainnet Ethereum, and allows anyone to post challenges of that data onchain, lowering costs. It also uses edge RPCs to lower latency and increase responsiveness, and is tightly integrated with MUD to enable anyone to easily build on top of Redstone worlds.

Redstone launched in May 2024, and saw the launch of eight new onchain games, and many more community-run projects. With Redstone, we also introduced Alt DA Mode to the OP Stack, and joined the Optimism Collective as contributors.

How is Lattice funded?

Lattice is funded entirely by grants from organizations such as 0xPARC Foundation and the Optimism Foundation.

What is Lattice’s relationship with 0xPARC?

0xPARC is the main funder and incubator of Lattice. 0xPARC drives research in a number of frontier technology categories related to Ethereum, blockchains, and cryptography. In addition to grants, Lattice works closely with the research talent at 0xPARC in areas related to zero-knowledge, identity, and Ethereum hardware.

Where is Lattice based?

We have offices in London, where six of our thirteen employees are based. The team is distributed across the UK, Europe, the United States, Central America, and Asia, but we regularly gather for team coworking sessions and retreats.

I’m interested in partnering with you. what should I do?

We are always open to partnering with ambitious teams building onchain applications or infrastructure that can support complex networks on Ethereum. If you are from a gaming team, application company, blockchain network, or are building open source tools for Ethereum that could work well with MUD, please get in touch at partnerships@lattice.xyz.

I’d like to join the team. What should I do?

Check out our Careers page.

TEAM
Ludens
Ludens
since 2021
Alvarius
Alvarius
since 2021
Biscaryn
Biscaryn
since 2022
Kooshaba
Kooshaba
since 2022
Frolic
Frolic
since 2022
Nagual
Nagual
since 2022
Vera
Vera
since 2023
Tdot
Tdot
since 2023
Consigliere
Consigliere
since 2023
Qbzzt
Qbzzt
since 2023
Kumpis
Kumpis
since 2024
Tux
Tux
since 2024
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0xParc
0xParc
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