Start your engines, because Redstone Mainnet is officially live! After a month-long Race to Mainnet, and almost a year of development, we are opening up our home for onchain worlds to game lovers and boundary-pushers across the Ethereum ecosystem.

Redstone is motivated first and foremost by its community. We decided to build Redstone after realizing that applications built with MUD, our engine for onchain applications, would struggle to scale if deployed on traditional L2’s, which are unoptimized for the data usage and throughput required by MUD apps. During the Race to Mainnet, we collaborated deeply with all of our launch teams, battle-testing everything from user-onboarding, to wallet UX, to MUD indexing, to Redstone uptime. Everything was designed with MUD and autonomous worlds in mind.

Along the way, we published interviews with Race to Mainnet teams, treated you to teaser videos, held playtests with World Explorers, WASD, and GG Quest, and more. In May, Redstone will feature releases of:

• Biomes, an “onchain Minecraft-like sandbox” by a team of digital physics aficionados and OPCraft fans
• DEAR, a new game from ARPA Network, featuring whimsical pixel-based artwork and a struggle between good and evil
• DF Archon, community-organized rounds of the beloved onchain game Dark Forest
• Downstream, an infinitely moddable MMO, and the "world's first Post Singularity Civilisation Simulator" built by Playmint
• GG Quest, an onchain gaming guild bringing quests, leaderboards, and progression to onchain games
• Sky Strife, a fully onchain RTS game built by the Lattice team, featuring fast-paced combat and tactical matches
• This Cursed Machine, a "science-fiction body horror fulfillment center simulator” by Moving Castles, an indie studio based in Berlin
• words3, a madcap onchain iteration of Scrabble, built by Small Brain Games, the much-beloved developer of onchain games like draw.tech, and most recently Yonk

And you can do much more than just play games or use apps on Redstone. Redstone apps are either built with MUD, or designed to be highly moddable, meaning you can make plugins, build new game modes and design third-party clients for every single application on Redstone. Many teams have even written docs to help get you started. The infinite game is just beginning.

In addition to the above games, Redstone will be launching with support from Redstone Market, an NFT marketplace built by Reservoir, relay.link, a fast-bridge with support for L2-to-L2 bridging, Redswap, a DEX running Uniswap v3 contracts, Safe, Randcast, Rainbow custom network support, and Privy, as well as Metamask and Walletconnect support.

Building Plasma Mode

Beyond our community of developers building on MUD and Redstone, we need to give a special thanks to Optimism, who helped us build Plasma Mode, the protocol on which Redstone runs. Plasma Mode, Redstone's Plasma-inspired alternative data availability protocol, modifies the data availability dynamics of traditional L2’s. Traditional rollups post the entire input data to Ethereum's Layer 1 (L1), incurring significant costs. Plasma Mode, instead, posts a data commitment hash, dramatically reducing the L1 data footprint. Developers can also have flexibility over which data provider they choose.

Additionally, Plasma Mode uses a permissionless challenge system inspired by Plasma. Any user can challenge a data commitment if they suspect data unavailability or manipulation. Challenges are adjudicated on Ethereum's L1, leveraging its robust security. This mechanism ensures that data integrity and availability are constantly enforced, building a trust layer essential for gaming applications with in-game assets and complex interactions. Redstone does not use a permissioned DA council or alternative forms of consensus; we use Ethereum itself to force data to be available. Chains running Plasma Mode are also completely independent from blob demand.

The Plasma Mode protocol has been merged into the Optimism repo, and Redstone is committing to the Superchain, and joining the Optimism Collective as OP Stack core developers. We are so thrilled to be working with Optimism on bringing Redstone (and Plasma Mode!) to everyone.

What Comes Next: Redstone Worlds Expo, Redstone Origin NFT, and More

Today, we are kicking off the first ever edition of the Redstone Worlds Expo, a series of community-curated spotlights for everyone to play and learn more about the applications launching on Redstone in May. From May 1st-15th, you can check the Redstone Community website, where, every day, for 24 hours only, a new Redstone game will be featured, with time-exclusive events around playing, fun facts about the team and project, and livestreams. The schedule for the Redstone Worlds Expo is here. Sky Strife will be launching today, with the other games launching over the next fifteen days.

Additionally, today, for one day only, you can mint the Redstone Origin NFT on the Redstone Community website to commemorate the launch of the chain. The artwork is designed by Anna and Arek Kajda, two designers and artists hailing from Germany, and the minting will be available until May 2nd at 16:00 UTC.

During these first few weeks, you may experience some hiccups, because Redstone is a new chain running a brand new protocol. If you encounter any issues, please don’t hesitate to get in contact with us in the #redstone-help channel on our Discord.

Forging Autonomous Worlds on Redstone

It’s been almost two years since Lattice’s co-founder, ludens, wrote an essay on Autonomous Worlds, which articulated a desire for onchain games that are extensible, moddable, and consequential (not to mention fun). In that time, a community around autonomous worlds has developed, and birthed countless onchain games. We couldn’t be more thrilled to be launching Redstone, and creating a home for autonomous worlds to evolve and thrive. To all of our community members and collaborators, thank you for making this possible with us.

Now it’s time to play.

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