Welcome to the latest edition of the Wormhole Chains series, where we discuss some of the latest chains that have been added to the Wormhole network. Today, we’re looking into XPLA.
1. What is XPLA?
XPLA (“Explore and Play”) is a proof-of-stake, Cosmos-based, gaming-specific L1 built by Metamagnet with its main partner, the Com2uS Group, one of the largest public Korean gaming studios. Metamagnet also built C2X, a blockchain gaming platform. While C2X will continue to exist as a gaming platform, XPLA aims to be a gaming mainnet that acts as a hub on which any third-party studio can build games and create media content.
2. What’s cool about XPLA?
The future of gaming: Web3
Since its inception just a few decades ago, the international gaming industry boasts a steady year-over-year growth and is nowadays bigger than the music & movie industries combined. In 2022, revenue is forecasted to surpass $200B (up from a mere $8B in 2006), and it is estimated that globally, there are around 3 billion people who play some sort of video game.
XPLA’s goal is to transition a myriad of those gamers into Web3 — they plan to do so via their XPLA SDK, which offers game developers the possibility to easily migrate their Web2 projects into Web3.
XPLA is extremely developer-friendly
Through the IBC (Inter-Blockchain Communication protocol), the Cosmos SDK, and the upcoming EVM compatibility (planned to go live in Q4 2022), the XPLA blockchain can be easily connected to other chains and allows for easy cross-chain migration and interoperability. XPLA is built with Tendermint, a state-of-the-art Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) blockchain engine, which allows software to be securely and consistently replicated.
But what is meant by “securely”? Well, it means that Tendermint continues to work, even if up to 1/3 of machines fail in arbitrary ways. The ability to tolerate machines failing in arbitrary ways — including becoming malicious — is known as Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT).
“Consistently” means that every non-faulty machine sees the same transaction log and computes the same state.
XPLA uses Cosmos’ security
XPLA is being built with the Cosmos SDK: the combination of using CosmWasm and the Tendermint Core proof-of-stake consensus mechanism assures the security of the whole Cosmos ecosystem and, with it, XPLA’s security.
3. Who’s on the Team?
As mentioned above, the Com2uS Group is responsible for developing the XPLA blockchain, they are experienced game developers who know how to ship.
Here are a few hard facts about the Com2uS Group and the XPLA development:
⚬ There are ~2000 Com2uS Group employees that are exclusively contributing to XPLA.
⚬ In 2021, the Com2uS Group reported ~$550M in revenue.
⚬ The group’s portfolio of games adds up to 2M daily active and 20M monthly active users.
⚬ The group pledged to be porting all of its existing and future IPs over to the XPLA ecosystem.
⚬ Com2Verse, the virtual workspace and metaverse project that the Com2uS Group is building, has already signed more than a dozen Korean conglomerates (KT, SK Networks, Hana Bank,…) and will launch its Beta in 2023 on XPLA. Check out the prototype here.
4. Anything else?
Speed & Costs
The XPLA blockchain offers a block time of 6 seconds, with ~1,000 tps (transactions per second) and an average transaction network fee of 0.13 XPLA (approximately $0.10).
Native Token
XPLA, the blockchain’s native utility token, is used for governance and staking.
Wallet
Block Explorer
Programming Languages
Documentation & GitHub
Contact & Socials
Stay up to date with XPLA by following their social channels:
Website | Twitter | Telegram | Blog
5. Wormhole Noob? No problem!
If you’re new to Wormhole, here’s what you need to know:
⚬ The protocol’s total volume stands at over $40B, with millions of transactions completed.
⚬ Currently, several thousand messages are submitted each day.
Check out Chase M., a Wormhole contributor, explaining more about Wormhole below:
6. Wormhole’s supported networks
Wormhole allows users to send assets to and from any of the supported chains without double-wrapping the asset. It enables seamless access to each network’s vibrant DeFi & NFT ecosystems!
XPLA is the latest addition to Wormhole’s network of supported chains — check out the Portal bridge to see which chains you can bridge to!!
7. Join the ever-growing Wormhole community
If you have questions, need support, or just want to connect, join the Wormhole community and keep up to date with our upcoming announcements. We’re always happy to hear feedback — join our Discord, and drop us a comment!