MagicBlock

[[PROJECT:337]] is real-time execution infrastructure for Solana. The project's core technology, Ephemeral Rollups, lets developers run application logic at 10ms block times with gasless transactions while keeping all state anchored to Solana mainnet. Co-founded by Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco, MagicBlock has raised $10.5 million in disclosed funding, shipped a Private Payments API on mainnet, and grown a builder ecosystem that has produced more than 300 projects since early 2025.

What Ephemeral Rollups Do

An Ephemeral Rollup is a just-in-time Solana Virtual Machine runtime. When an application needs real-time execution, specific Solana mainnet accounts are delegated to an ephemeral rollup session. Those accounts execute inside a specialized SVM runtime co-located for low latency, achieving end-to-end latency under 50ms according to MagicBlock's documentation. Magic Router, MagicBlock's RPC layer, coordinates transaction routing between Solana's base layer and the ephemeral environment in parallel.

When a session ends, the final state commits back to Solana mainnet. Because execution stays within the SVM and settlement happens on Solana, applications keep access to Solana's liquidity and composability without bridges or fragmented state. Developers deploying programs on Solana are fully compatible with the ephemeral rollup down to the bytecode level.

On the developer side, integration requires adding a single #[ephemeral] attribute to an Anchor program to mark accounts for delegation. MagicBlock maintains 13 open-source examples covering primitives ranging from real-time counters to private rock-paper-scissors and sealed auctions.

Zero Fees and Compliant Privacy

Gasless transactions remove per-interaction friction, which matters particularly for gaming applications where a single session can involve hundreds of state transitions. The economics work because the ephemeral runtime handles execution volume without hitting Solana mainnet for each transaction.

Privacy arrived on Solana mainnet in March 2026 with the Private Payments API. Confidential transfers use Intel TDX Trusted Execution Environments, allowing application state to stay private without sacrificing verifiability. Early integrations include OOBE (private swaps and transfers for onchain AI agents) and myStableCorp (business payment flows where transaction amounts stay private). The same TEE infrastructure powers MagicBlock's verifiable random function, which games use for lootbox resolution and random tile selection.

Funding and Backers

MagicBlock raised a $7.5 million seed round announced April 25, 2025, led by Lightspeed Faction with participation from Maven11, Delphi Digital, Robot Ventures, Mechanism Capital, Equilibrium, and Pivot Global. Angel investors include Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, Mert Mumtaz, and Tristan Yver. That round followed a $3 million pre-seed from a16z's Crypto Startup Accelerator in September 2024, bringing total disclosed funding to $10.5 million.

The company ran a self-hosted token presale February 5-8, 2026; the amount raised was not publicly disclosed.

Co-founders Andrea Fortugno and Gabriele Picco pioneered the Ephemeral Rollup concept. Fortugno described the project's position at the seed announcement: "Every developer wants to build on the fastest chain with the deepest liquidity -- that's Solana. But they also want the customizability and real-time performance of a Web2 server. With MagicBlock, they don't have to choose."

The Builder Pipeline: Blitz, Forge, Founders Camp

MagicBlock operates a structured builder funnel. Solana Blitz is a weekly hackathon series that passed 300 cumulative projects with the v7 edition, a full-week collaboration-themed format that drew 65 projects from 25 countries. Blitz v8 results, announced September 17, 2026, covered 36 projects. Recent winners include BlitzMine (a real-time mining game using on-chain VRF for winning tile selection), Tenor (a private multi-dealer FX request-for-quote using Private Ephemeral Rollups), and Oobe Protocol (an open-source MCP server giving AI agents native MagicBlock tooling).

Prior Compass coverage of the series: MagicBlock Solana Blitz v6: 41 Mobile Apps, Three Winners, One Weekend.

Forge is MagicBlock's incubator. Epoch 01 teams receive weekly one-on-one engineering mentorship, go-to-market support, and a defined path to their first 1,000 users. The Founders Camp, running September 21-30, 2026 in Bangkok, takes ten selected teams through ten days of founder mentorship, fundraising training, and a Demo Day, supported by Solana Foundation and Superteam Thailand. MagicBlock committed $100,000 to direct builder grants; over 20% was deployed in the first six months of 2026.

Live Applications

Several production applications run on MagicBlock infrastructure. JungleFun, built with MonkeDAO, is a fully onchain gacha machine where pack odds are verified by MagicBlock VRF. It generated approximately 1,000 SOL in revenue within its first 19 days, with over 3,000 pack rips recorded. Bakeland, an MMORPG on Solana Mobile, uses MagicBlock VRF for lootbox drops. Supersize runs fully onchain multiplayer skill games with every move settled to Solana. Imperial Perps offers leveraged trading across memes, forex, equities, and majors aggregated onchain. Slimecoin operates seven head-to-head games where players wager USDC. Flash Trade, a derivatives exchange, uses Ephemeral Rollups for real-time gas-efficient trading.

Early infrastructure partnerships span Pyth Lazer (1ms price feeds via MagicBlock runtime extensions), Jito (restaking to improve validator security and reduce execution time), and dTelecom (decentralized voice and video over Ephemeral Rollups).

Growth

MagicBlock reported in its August 2026 monthly update that every key performance indicator had multiplied by at least 40x since the start of 2026. The community numbers 44,000+ Discord members and 45,000+ followers on X. Eight Blitz editions have shipped, the Forge program is in its first operating epoch, and the Founders Camp marks the team's push to graduate hackathon projects into sustained products.