SAGA Network ($SAGA)

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10 Apr 2024

SAGA Network ($SAGA)

Saga is for developers. Developers are the unsung heroes of web3 and deserve far better platforms and support on their way to building their applications and chains.

Many in the crypto community believe that sovereign chains communicating freely with one another is the future for crypto infrastructure, and that now is the right time to move in that direction. However, most native crypto developers, not to mention web2 developers coming into web3, forgo being a part of this vision because they find the upfront investment and effort too high, only to see their projects constrained once they grow. Saga makes this vision accessible. We are a protocol for automatically provisioning application-specific blockchains in the multichain metaverse, or multiverse. We are building this by rearchitecting developer and end user interactions with blockchains.

Using shared security, innovations in validator orchestration, and an automated CI/ CD deployment pipeline standardized across apps in single tenant VMs, Saga makes launching a dedicated blockchain, or chainlet, as easy as deploying a smart contract. Our network is best leveraged as a scalability layer for web3 infrastructure. Saga offers: › No upfront cost to launch a chain › Predictable developer pricing for provisioning block space › Automated deployment of a single tenant application onto its own chain › A dedicated shared security chain for a developer’s applications, ensuring high throughput, no dependencies on other applications using Saga, easy upgradability and congestion relief.

In addition, Saga’s unique token mechanism design enables interesting and flexible developer business models and end user experiences that were not supported before in crypto:

› Saga does not charge network fees directly to the end user, leaving monetization instead in the hands of developers.

› Saga enables transaction fees to be denominated in any IBC-compatible token, not just the Saga token. Because our chainlets are meant to be used by developers for new and established projects alike, our token model uniquely enables the tokens of other protocols to accrue value even though the Saga Chain serves as the backend.

Saga’s initial focus will be on gaming and entertainment chains. Not only do these applications have the most urgent need for dedicated runtime environments and close to 100% SLA, they are also the fastest growing sector in web3 with the most immediate potential for mass appeal. As the metaverse expands, performance requirements and end user expectations are climbing higher and higher, and crypto-based applications have to deliver. While the metaverse is a burgeoning use case, DeFi will always be at the heart of web3. Saga believes that its innovations in blockchain, which ultimately open the door to processing low value, high volume transactions at scale, will enable new classes of DeFi applications that were not previously possible. As demand for smart contract technology continues to grow, developers and end users are running into three main challenges: high and unpredictable gas fees, congestion and lack of flexibility and upgradability as applications have to share blockspace with more and more applications on the same chain. In the category of high gas fees, Ethereum receives the lion share of attention. In an CNBC article¹, MacKenzie Sigalos writes: “It has always been a tough go for Ethereum users. The blockchain has a long-standing problem with scaling, and its highly unpredictable and sometimes exorbitant transaction fees can annoy even its biggest fans.” February 5th, 2022, was a particularly notable trading day since nearly $20 million was spent on Ethereum gas fees, representing an 800% increase over the $2.4 million spent on gas fees the day before.

The increase was mostly due to congestion.² Congestion and high gas fees do not always go hand in hand. Many Layer 1s since Ethereum have been able to offer lower gas fees but still suffer from congestion and significant performance issues on the chain. In an effort to mitigate congestion, these base layer protocols are trying to develop blockchains with “fatter pipes” to try to cram more transactions into limited blockspace. While faster individual blockchains are helpful, congestion issues invariably resurface as end users compete to use a variety of applications.

Fees on Avalanche’s C-chain rivaled³ that of Ethereum during peak congestion while excessive transactions⁴ on Solana have contributed to several network halts. The fundamental problem is that blockspace is scarce in monolithic blockchains where resources are shared across myriad projects. Finally, anytime a developer builds on a chain other than their own, they are dependent on the project that launches the chain, the community and other stakeholders for upgrades and decisions about their development cycles. It is no wonder, then, that applications and protocols are outgrowing their chains and need to scale horizontally or migrate onto a different chain.

Axie Infinity, Compound and Flow are some of the most recent examples that have chosen this path. From its inception, the Cosmos tech stack has sought to solve these problems by emphasizing selfsovereignty. Each developer was meant to have their own dedicated chain, and therefore blockspace, to build on. However, deploying secure applications on Cosmos has also been difficult, slow and technically complex. Every application has to recruit, maintain and coordinate between its own validator set, and so developers have to consider the multiparty dynamics of secure consensus that are not a consideration for builders on Ethereum, Solana or any other monolithic Layer 1. In addition, Cosmos aimed for maximum composability, which meant that while developers could customize applications as they liked, they also had to deal with the complexity of working with many modules. Since the Cosmos SDK was first released in 2018, several advancements in the ecosystem have made the developer and end user experiences better. In 2021, Inter Blockchain Communication (IBC) was released, which fulfilled the Cosmos promise of enabling sovereign chains to communicate with one another and transfer assets securely.

Over the last year, projects such as Juno, Evmos, Archway and Agoric have given developers a controlled and simplified VM environment in which to develop their Cosmos-based applications. In 2022, the Cosmos Hub will release its first version of Interchain Security, also commonly known as shared security, which paves the way for a validator set on one chain to validate subsidiary chains. Together, these three key innovations in Cosmos allow for a uniquely scalable ecosystem of chains, also known as the multichain world. We do not believe it is an accident that the Cosmos moment has arrived just in time for the Cambrian explosion in the metaverse.

As web3 leads growth in the gaming, entertainment and fintech markets, greater demands will be placed on the robustness and scalability of the underlying chains and the end user experience. Saga aims to be the protocol for this multiverse.

The Saga mainnet is the developer’s portal into the Saga ecosystem. Like most smart contracting platforms, the developer deploys their compiled smart contract binary onto the Saga mainnet. Once initialized, the Saga validators automatically provision a Saga dedicated chain, or chainlet, containing the smart contract. In essence, a Saga chainlet is a sovereign blockchain with a VM module running a single smart contract. Because each chainlet contains only the smart contracts a developer or team would like to deploy on a single chain, the developer has a flexible and usable development environment:

› For the developer, the deployment of chainlet is as easy as deploying a smart contract
› Chainlet block space is not shared with any other application, leading to predictable fees
› Saga is VM agnostic, which means developers can bring their own VM module to plug into their chainlet
› Chainlet components such as VM module, SDK and Tendermint Core can be upgraded independently from other applications and Saga mainnet
› Ultimately, Saga could also support other technology stacks down the line besides Cosmos SDK and Tendermint Saga enables developers to manually “shard” various workflows into multiple chainlets to leverage horizontal scaling.

Deploying a Uniswap-like AMM smart contract into its own application specific chainlet will already offer significant scalability improvements. However, once the demand for the smart contract starts exceeding the limitations of current blockchain technology, the developer could deploy multiple instances of the same smart contract focused on particular subsets of activity. In the AMM example, the developer could deploy a smart contract instance for each asset pair. The chainlet architecture enables near limitless scalability, as long as these chainlets can be secured properly.