Winding Down Lattice

After five years, Lattice is winding down. We're writing this post to explain why, to share what's happening with the projects we've built, and to make sure anyone with funds on Redstone has time to withdraw them.

How we got here

We started Lattice in early 2021 to build Autonomous Worlds — virtual worlds where the core rules live onchain and can't be changed by anyone, not even the creators, but everything on top is programmable by the players themselves. We bet that this combination of unchangeable physics and deep programmability would produce real emergence: player-created economies, institutions, and culture that no developer could design top-down.

To make that possible, we built MUD, an open-source framework for large onchain applications. Along the way, MUD became the most widely used framework for onchain games on Ethereum, adopted by teams ranging from independent developers to CCP Games for EVE Frontier. We built Redstone when no existing L2 could meet the throughput and cost requirements of what we were building, contributing Alt-DA mode to the OP Stack and launching the first Plasma-style chain on the Superchain. And we built Quarry, an infrastructure layer that delivers instant pre-confirmations, and Dozer, a high-performance indexer for large onchain state.

To fund our operation and develop these projects, we received grant funding from 0xPARC, The Optimism Foundation, The EF, and others. We chose not to raise venture capital. We are deeply grateful to the organizations that believed in what we were building.

Ultimately, we never managed to turn any of it into a sustainable business. By early 2025, it was clear that our runway would end later that year and that by default we didn't have a path to revenue that would change that.

DUST

Rather than wind down quietly, we decided to spend our remaining runway on one final push: building DUST, the autonomous world we had always envisioned. A voxel world with fixed physics, scarce resources, and programmability as a core primitive.

DUST validated a lot of what we believed about autonomous worlds. Players created their own currencies, marketplaces, cities, transportation systems, and even a newspaper. None of it was baked into the core mechanics. Browse The Daily Dust for a taste of the stories that unfolded (the newspaper itself is one of them).

But DUST didn't reach the scale needed to sustain a business. And by late 2025, as we were considering whether to raise money to continue, we didn't have the conviction that the VC route was the right path for this, and key members of the team had developed interests in new directions.

What happens next

DUST lives on. We built a migration tool for MUD that moves entire worlds, including all state, and programs, between chains. DUST has already migrated to the DUST Chain, hosted by Conduit with support from the Optimism Foundation. It runs at the same speed (via Flashblocks and optimistic client rendering) and cost (via EigenDA) as before. Members of the team are continuing to work on DUST and autonomous worlds through 0xPARC, with more to share soon.

MUD is feature complete. It's been audited by OpenZeppelin, used in production across multiple projects, and fully open source. We didn't have to make changes to MUD while building DUST, which we think speaks to its maturity. The migration tool we built is also available for any MUD project that needs to move between chains.

Quarry and Dozer are now open source. Wiresaw is our instant pre-confirmation block builder, achieving ~7ms transaction confirmation by replacing the traditional mempool model with a first-come-first-serve approach that commits to transaction ordering immediately. Dozer is a high-performance indexer we originally planned to offer as a hosted service. Both are now fully open source.

Redstone is shutting down on May 15, 2026 (23:59 UTC). Please withdraw your funds before then using any of the bridges listed at the top of this post. After the shutdown, we'll take a snapshot of account balances and deploy a withdrawal contract on Ethereum L1, so you'll still be able to recover ETH and WETH held in EOAs. However, funds held in contracts on Redstone (Uniswap pools, etc.) won't be recoverable this way, since the contract addresses that held your balance on L2 won't exist on L1. If you have funds in contracts, please withdraw them before the deadline.

Thank you

Lattice initially grew out of the community around Dark Forest, which was the original inspiration for zkDungeon. The Dark Forest team kindly let us work from their office in those early months, and that community eventually grew into 0xPARC. Sina Habibian at the Ethereum Foundation supported us with early grants. Igor Barinov at xDai believed in what we were doing early on and funded us when we were just two people with an idea. Those early bets made everything that followed possible.

The Ethereum Foundation funded our early years and seeded 0xPARC, which became both a funder and a close collaborator throughout Lattice's life. 0xPARC co-organized the Autonomous Worlds Assembly, the AW residencies, and many of the events that brought this community together. The Optimism Foundation supported us once we started contributing to the OP Stack. And CCP Games was a great collaborator over the years, pushing us to build better tools.

To the team: Kooshaba, who built Sky Strife and our first in-house game studio. Biscaryn, who turned Lattice into an actual company and handled most of the non-technical side single-handedly for years. Tdot, who built Redstone, Quarry, and our entire infrastructure stack, and kept it all running. Frolic, who built out most of the MUD client-side tooling and was a major contributor to the DUST client. Kumpis, who built all our websites and the World Explorer. Vdrg, who built most of the DUST contracts and wrote the MUD ERC standard. Consigliere, who took over the operational side of the company. Ryan, who built Dozer. Vera, who managed all of our communication and ecosystem development. Qbzzt, who managed all of our docs. Turbo, who designed the visual identity of Lattice, MUD, Redstone, and Quarry. Zuse and Dhvani, who took OPCraft after we stopped working on it and turned it into Biomes, which eventually turned into DUST when we joined forces. Dhvani also built most of the DUST codebase and managed the entire migration. Yonada, dk1a, Authcall, mp944, Tux, Smsurnato, Berzan, Althwen, Nagual, Kooshaza, Lermchair, and everyone else who was part of the team over the years.

To everyone who joined the first Autonomous Worlds residency in London (Small Brain Games, Kamigotchi, Flynn, Yonada, and many others), everyone who attended the Autonomous Worlds Assembly, the ETHGlobal Autonomous Worlds hackathon, everyone who used Redstone, everyone who uses MUD, and everyone who played our games: zkDungeon, OPCraft, Sky Strife, DUST. Special thanks to the DUST community for everything they've built so far, and hopefully will continue to build.

And to everyone we didn't name here: open source contributors, creators of the tools we built on top of, collaborators we crossed paths with over the years. Five years is a lot of people. If you were part of this in any way, thank you.

Ludens & Alvarius

2021 — 2026