Interview and translation: Alex Liu, Foresight News
Saga is a Layer 1 protocol that allows developers to automatically create virtual machine-independent, parallelized, interoperable dedicated chains, or "Chainlets", to provide unlimited horizontal scalability for applications. Its mainnet was officially launched yesterday, and the token opened high and continued to rise on the top exchanges, reaching a high of 7.89USDT, with a fully diluted value (FDV) of nearly 8 billion US dollars.
Before it landed on Binance Launchpool, broke the record of total locked value and number of participants in the event, and had a brilliant price performance after the opening, not many people paid attention to and understood it. For a while, the Chinese community was full of questions like "What is this project and why is it so powerful?"
Previously, Foresight News exclusively interviewed Saga CEO and co-founder Rebecca Liao, and talked with her about Saga's origin, technology, vision and 100+ potential airdrop opportunities in the future. I hope this article comes at the right time and can help you resolve doubts and understand Saga through in-depth conversations.
The following is the interview content:
Foresight News: Thank you for accepting the interview with Foresight News. Before founding Saga, you worked as a lawyer and worked in AI-related technology companies and political teams. Please briefly introduce yourself and talk about why you later entered the blockchain industry and founded Saga.
Rebecca: My career has been centered around development economics. While working at Globality, my first AI startup, I learned about Bitcoin and blockchain and realized the clear impact it could have on democratizing financial services. I first felt the urge to start a company, so I co-founded Skuchain, a DeFi project focused on RWAs, with Zaki Manian.
By 2020, its annual transaction volume reached $5 billion. In 2021, I left the company to pursue a potential position in government, but ultimately decided to stay in crypto. Saga was founded on a desire to give developers a complete blockchain end-to-end (E2E) experience that didn't exist before. L1 creates L1's system to scale infinitely and remain free on the front end, enabling Web3 developers to finally build applications that can gain mass adoption. Since then, we have focused on the applications that need this infrastructure the most: games and entertainment. Saga's vision is to provide a space for those who dare to pursue their wildest dreams - a place to celebrate freedom and explore creative expression.
Foresight News: You mentioned at X that you knew Zaki (Cosmos core contributor) 10 years ago and had contributed to the Cosmos project before. Why did you choose the Cosmos SDK to build your own project?
Rebecca: Zaki and I are co-founders of Skuchain. After he started building Cosmos, I knew the power of the technology, but also the challenges. Not everyone wants a sovereign independent application chain, but using dedicated block space to scale applications is the answer for future blockchain applications. This is why we decided to build Saga using the Cosmos SDK.
Cosmos is still the only native multi-chain stack that understands the challenges of building decentralized blockchains and provides fast bridging and interoperability with other chains. All other scaling solutions, including Rollups and other application chain variants, are still catching up with the technical understanding of the Cosmos SDK.
Foresight News: Many people classify Saga as modular. Do you think this is an accurate classification? Or is BaaS more appropriate?
Rebecca: From a technical perspective, Saga can indeed be classified in the modular field because it focuses on providing dedicated blockchain solutions and has the ability to provide verification services for blockchains created with Saga and ordering services for modular Rollups. In addition, Saga's cooperation with Celestia and subsequent cooperation with Polygon demonstrated our adaptability and ability to provide key infrastructure in the Web3 field, consolidating our position in the modular blockchain ecosystem.
It is accurate to classify Saga in the modular field, but it is worth emphasizing that BaaS (Blockchain as a service) is not more appropriate to describe Saga. Unlike traditional BaaS solutions, Saga emphasizes the provision of dedicated block space and has the ability to automatically instantiate dedicated chains, which is more in line with the modular blockchain framework and allows scalability and flexibility when deploying dedicated blockchain solutions.
Foresight News: What is the difference between Chainlet built with Saga and RollApp built with Dymension? What is infinite horizontal scalability?
Rebecca: The difference between Chainlets built using Saga and RollApp built using Dymension is significant.
Benefiting from our platform's protocol, Chainlets built with Saga are able to automatically launch fully decentralized private chains, and cross-chain communication (IBC) and fast bridging give them the ability to freely interoperate between Chainlets, Saga main chains, and other blockchains. This provides unlimited performance and scalability, making it an ideal solution for developers seeking modular and scalable blockchain infrastructure.
On the other hand, RollApp built with Dymension focuses on transaction settlement, consensus, and execution, while leveraging external providers for data availability, execution environment, and liquidity. Unlike Chainlets on Saga, Dymension RollApp operates within a fully modular framework, allowing for flexible selection of DA providers and execution environments to meet specific application needs, but also increasing complexity. Since Dymension lacks a local settlement environment, there is no fast finality, and therefore no fast bridging capabilities or interoperability.
Chainlets on Saga also provide developers with a commodity-level block space price. Rather than seeking to merge the prices of multiple protocols that make up the stack, as would be the case with a fully modular system, our economic model aims to achieve zero cost on the front end so that developers can monetize as they wish, and end users will not pay any gas fees to Saga. Given that the Chainlet fee is the only fee in the system, it should be the most economical way to develop.
Unlimited horizontal scalability is the core concept of Saga - all Chainlets are parallelized application chain instances, enabling applications to elastically scale to their maximum performance and speed, meeting the demand for unlimited scalability in the blockchain ecosystem. You can understand why Saga is attractive for games and entertainment.
Foresight News: What do you think about the current progress and prospects of web3 games?
Rebecca: We foresee Web3 gaming moving in the direction of an early form of the multiverse, emphasizing the role of modders and creators in shaping game IP. The industry’s focus will shift to leveraging the power of the community and creative expression, rather than relying solely on the production value of games. This signals that the next few years will be an exciting and transformative phase for Web3 gaming. A concrete example of what we believe is current progress: user adoption growth. The Web3 gaming market is continuing to grow, with an increase in the number of unique active wallets and industry share. A great example of this is that 80% of the 300+ projects built on Saga fall into the gaming category. X-to-Earn applications also provide players with the opportunity to leverage their skills and playtime, creating a more engaging and profitable gaming environment for everyone.
Foresight News: Why do games need to be built on the blockchain? And why is it their own L1, rather than being built together with other games on Ethereum L2 like Immutable? How to solve the liquidity problem of cross-chain transactions of virtual assets? Will there be a unified market?
Rebecca: Games built on blockchain can gain true ownership of game assets, achieve decentralized economy, and enhance security. Using blockchain, game developers can provide players with verifiable scarcity assets, provable ownership, and securely trade game assets across different platforms. Unlike games deployed on Ethereum L2 with other games, developers have more control over the game ecosystem by developing games on their own L1 blockchain using Saga. This approach provides dedicated block space, scalability, and community-driven governance, allowing customized experiences and efficient interactions in the game environment.
Saga solves the cross-chain transaction liquidity problem of virtual items by providing dedicated infrastructure, making seamless interoperability between Chainlets, Saga main chain and other blockchains possible. This promotes the liquidity transfer and interoperability of assets and solves the liquidity limitations associated with cross-chain transactions.
Saga’s focus on fostering collaboration and expanding the multiverse shows the potential for a unified market. The platform’s focus on community-generated content and decentralized control of games makes this possible.
Foresight News: Saga is currently focusing on the gaming ecosystem. What unique advantages have attracted these GameFi projects? Will Saga expand into other areas outside of gaming in the future?
Rebecca: It was clear that the GameFi project was attracted by our groundbreaking innovation in infrastructure. The Phase 1 Mainnet allows developers to automatically launch fully decentralized private chains (Chainlets) on Saga. This enables developers to freely interoperate between Chainlets, Saga, and other chains using IBC, providing unlimited performance and scalability. In addition, the Saga Multiverse Summit showcased a growing community of innovators who create games on Saga, including projects like Shrapnel, Cosmic Exodus, and AILAND, providing innovative and immersive gaming experiences. While Saga is currently focused on the gaming ecosystem, our mission is to break down barriers in Web3 and enable creators to focus on creation without having to build backend systems themselves. It is obvious that by automatically launching parallelized and interoperable private chains, we will expand into other areas, such as entertainment or decentralized finance.
Foresight News: Saga is an L1 that issues L1s. It is a B-to-B project, but it pays special attention to the community. What does the community mean to Saga?
Rebecca: Community is vital to Saga and represents a diverse network of creators, developers, and evangelists. It is the hub that fosters creativity, drives innovation, and supports individuals in realizing their visions within the Saga ecosystem. Without our community, there would be no project. It is the backbone of our user base, the cornerstone of our market, and a key factor in attracting games and other applications. Applications are attracted to use us because we have such a wonderful community.
Our mission is to be the place where crazy dreamers come to realize their wildest dreams, and I think we’ve made a lot of progress toward that goal.
Foresight News: The community reflects that due to the relatively complicated airdrop rules, not many groups can actually receive it. Saga has announced that it will airdrop to SAGA stakers in the second phase. Will those users who are not eligible in the first phase, including many long-term stakers, have a chance in the future?
Rebecca: We will release the full criteria for the Season 2 airdrop event soon, and all unclaimed Season 1 airdrops will be distributed to SAGA stakers in Season 2. In addition, we have teased our stakers with over 100 confirmed airdrops from partners. The total number of eligible wallets for Season 1 is 200,000, which is a healthy number. These wallets must be spread across our key technology partners, including Cosmos, Celestia, Avalanche, and Polygon, as well as our community, ecosystem builders, and gamers participating in our Play-to-Airdrop event. With so many stakeholders, the airdrop criteria must be designed to be broad.
Foresight News: What are the development priorities of the project after the mainnet launch? What can players and token stakers expect in the future?
Rebecca: We will complete all 6 phases of the mainnet launch, launch games through Saga Origins, continue to onboard new projects to our Innovator Program — a full 350 projects have signed up so far, and execute 100+ airdrops to our stakers. The final statistics will be revealed in the press release we publish along with the mainnet launch.