Improbable founder and CEO Herman Narula stated in a statement that Somnia plans to launch on devnet in the coming weeks, addressing the long-standing scalability issues that have hindered blockchain technology. He added that the company has developed Somnia using its knowledge from gaming and distributed systems, with a focus on 'mass consumer applications,' including gaming, social platforms, and decentralized finance (DeFi).

The EVM-compatible blockchain will utilize ICEdb's 'breakthrough technology,' which Improbable claims provides 'ultra-fast read/write times' and 'advanced compression algorithms,' asserting its data transmission efficiency is 10-20 times higher than other blockchains. In preliminary tests with 100 validators, Somnia claims to process hundreds of thousands of EVM transactions per second on non-sharded data using 'innovative compression strategies and custom data ingestion layers' to minimize the bandwidth required for transaction data.

Improbable will contribute to the 'key technological components' of the Somnia blockchain, while the project is backed by the Virtual Society Foundation, an independent organization initiated by Improbable, with initial funding coming from the metaverse ecosystem MSquared (itself launched by Improbable in April 2023).

Paul Thomas, founder of the Virtual Society Foundation, stated in a statement: 'Somnia's unprecedented blockchain capabilities are paving the way for real-time, mass consumer applications.'

Given Improbable's focus on the metaverse, Somnia's mission statement emphasizes this specific application, aiming to create 'a network of rich experiences, useful and valuable virtual objects, and a fully decentralized network that enables people to build real businesses without relying on a large gaming enterprise.'

While the blockchain will initially focus on 'gaming, the metaverse, and social experiences,' its creators wrote that it will ultimately have broader use cases. They said: 'We can't even be 100% sure what the technology we are creating can build. @Somnia Official #Somnia $SOMI