Lattice is building tools and infrastructure to make ambitious, complex, large-scale blockchain applications possible.
Our goal is to take blockchain applications beyond just finance and speculation, to encompass playful use-cases such as games, virtual worlds, P2P consumer apps and social relationships. We want to transition Ethereum from a financial computer to its original ambition as the World Computer.
Our most major software contribution so far is MUD. MUD is an onchain operating system for Ethereum. It is built as a micro-kernel, with its core module being an embedded relational database that replaces the traditional storage model of Ethereum. All of MUD is onchain and runs on the EVM.
On the hardware side, we are building Redstone, a Plasma-inspired L2 built on the OP Stack. Redstone is designed for autonomous worlds and onchain applications that are looking for a cost-effective way to scale users and data usage. Learn more about Redstone here and here.
You can read more about our history here to see some of the things we’ve worked on so far.
Since the release of MUD in 2022:
- Multiple large teams are building their next project on MUD, including a multi-billion-dollar game studio that has previously built a 5m+ player massively multiplayer online game.
- We released OPCraft - an onchain Minecraft clone developed in-house, in collaboration with Optimism. In the span of two weeks, more than a thousand players made more than 3.5m transactions, architecting monuments, and even forming governments. You can watch the recap video [5 min], the introduction blog post [10 min], and the post-mortem blog post. We also presented a technical video on how we built OPCraft at Devcon Bogota.
- Lattice, OPCraft, and our Autonomous Worlds philosophy were featured on WIRED: Autonomous Worlds Aim to Free Online Games From Corporate Control.
- We organized a massive virtual hackathon with ETH Global, which saw 400+ hackers build 100+ projects with MUD.
- We organized various in-person events — an Autonomous Worlds residency, a game jam in Berlin, a symposium — and brought together a vibrant community of full-time teams building on MUD. You can see projects built with MUD on the community website and at the Autonomous Worlds residency demo day.
- We announced Redstone at Devconnect in Fall 2023, the first Plasma-inspired alternative DA chain for the OP Stack
- We published an Autonomous Worlds book that people are sharing on Twitter — the hype is real.
A community of builders has quickly organized itself around MUD and Redstone, and the prospect of building large applications on Ethereum.
We are pioneering a new product category within crypto — Autonomous Worlds — that developers are rallying behind. We are uniquely positioned to enable crypto’s transition from a financial technology to a new computing paradigm. Just as the internet went from limited use-cases within academia to encompass every facet of our daily life, we have a chance to bring Ethereum beyond finance.
If you are up for the challenge, being an engineer at Lattice can be exhilarating.
Lattice is a real “full stack” crypto company. Our product development reaches across the entire crypto stack - from what we call hardware (chains / execution layer / L2s — anything that runs the EVM), over software (onchain operating systems, EVM frameworks, tooling), to applications.
Working at Lattice means working on the cutting edge of what’s possible with blockchain technology and being a founding member of a new industry.
We were the first to put ECS onchain, which since has become the industry standard for onchain gaming. We then went one step further and put relational databases onchain. For this we rolled out our own onchain storage engine with dynamic schema definitions (as opposed to compile-time schemas in vanilla Solidity).
In 2022 we put Minecraft onchain, just to see if we could do it. We needed a pure function mapping each coordinate to a terrain type, so we rolled out our own high performance Perlin noise implementation in Solidity and WebAssembly and used it to implement the most advanced closed-form procedural terrain generation algorithm we know of.
More recently, we announced Redstone, and launched the Redstone Holesky testnet, which is already seeing builders and activity.
We are a very small team of highly efficient engineers, have a low bureaucratic overhead and are focused on shipping code to production. We maintain short cycles that makes code we write reach a strong grass root community of developers almost immediately.
We’re a mission-driven team, and we believe in:
- Open source — Open Source at the core of our software output; no business source license and other shenanigans
- Operator owned — A company owned by its operators and employees
- Community native — We are as good and creative as the community we foster
- Ethereum aligned — Aligned with the Ethereum ecosystem, protocol, and technology
- Intellectually honest — Truth-seeking at all cost
A core piece of writing underpinning our philosophy for the future of Ethereum is captured in the Autonomous Worlds essay by ludens, our co-founder.
