Star Atlas

Star Atlas is an AAA space exploration massively multiplayer online game built on Solana where players own their in-game assets on-chain and participate in a player-driven economy governed through two tokens — ATLAS for in-game transactions and POLIS for protocol governance.

Studio Background

ATMTA, the studio behind Star Atlas, was founded in 2020 by CEO Michael Wagner. The company financed development without venture capital, relying instead on token and digital asset sales that have collectively raised more than $220 million. That approach left the studio exposed when FTX collapsed in November 2022, freezing approximately $15 million in ATMTA funds and forcing headcount reductions from a peak of 235 employees to roughly 100. ATMTA has not sought external equity since and retains independent ownership of the project's direction and intellectual property.

Live Products

The primary live experience is SAGE Labs, a browser-based on-chain economic simulator playable without high-end hardware or a dedicated game client. Players select one of three in-universe factions — MUD (representing humanity), ONI (a collective of alien species), or Ustur (a synthetic race) — and deploy fleets across the Galia Expanse galaxy. Core activities include mining asteroids for raw resources, crafting components from those materials, and scanning for Survey Data Units (SDUs), which unlock valuable in-game rewards. Every fleet deployment, mining run, and crafting transaction is settled on Solana mainnet. Each starbase in SAGE Labs operates as an insulated local market, allowing players to buy and sell items within the game without bridging assets out to external exchanges.

Alongside SAGE Labs, ATMTA operates Holosim, a free-to-play browser strategy simulation focused on fleet management and tactical gameplay. Holosim serves as a lower-barrier entry point into the Star Atlas universe and does not require existing asset holdings to participate. A third module, Fleet Command — an overhead territory control system for managing large armadas and competing for regional dominance — is listed as coming soon on the official roadmap.

The Full UE5 Game

The project's long-term goal is an open-world space RPG rendered in Unreal Engine 5 with ship-to-ship combat in third-person perspective, FPS ground battles, exploration, and deep crafting systems. An early-access build is available through the Epic Games Store. ATMTA has stated a goal of launching Season 0 of the full MMO experience, though CEO Wagner has publicly acknowledged that pinning a hard release date to a game of this scope is difficult.

A 2D browser prototype, Star Atlas: Golden Era, launched in 2023 as an intermediate product during the longer UE5 development cycle and was attracting approximately 1,500 daily active users as of 2025 reporting.

Dual-Token Economy

Star Atlas runs a two-token model designed to separate currency from governance:

ATLAS is the primary in-game currency. It is inflationary by design, with supply calibrated to track growth in the game's GDP. ATLAS is used to purchase ships, hire crew members, buy fuel and equipment, and pay marketplace fees. Players earn it through infrastructure contracts, faction fleet staking, SDU hunting, and marketplace activity. Available data indicates the economy was emitting roughly 9.69 million ATLAS tokens per day, with approximately 66% of those emissions being reinvested within the game rather than sold on secondary markets.

POLIS is the governance token. Holders vote on game economic parameters including ATLAS inflation rates, asset release schedules, and development priorities. POLIS also carries in-game political weight: players stake it to control starbases, set territorial policies, and govern player-run regions of the Galia Expanse. The Star Atlas DAO, composed of POLIS holders, had accumulated approximately $1.37 million from in-game fees and sinks over the year leading to July 2025 and held a treasury of $1.66 million as of that date. The DAO's first formal governance proposal, PIP-1, entered its on-chain voting phase in 2025, ratifying a constitution and formalizing community authority over treasury deployment.

Across all activities, players were generating over $700,000 in monthly earnings as of available reporting periods, led by infrastructure contracts ($263,726), faction fleet rewards ($192,420), and POLIS staking ($97,016).

Zink: ATMTA's Own L1

In August 2025, ATMTA launched Zink, a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) Layer 1 blockchain purpose-built to support the throughput demands of fully on-chain game systems. Zink's defining feature is a patent-pending zero-knowledge identity layer called zProfiles, which gives players a single on-chain identity with global permission settings. These settings can automate high-frequency in-game actions — fleet movements, crafting steps — without requiring a manual wallet signature for each transaction, while preserving security protections for core asset holdings.

Zink launched its network on August 13, 2025. An XP tracking and airdrop campaign was scheduled to begin in September 2025, leading to a mainnet genesis event planned for December 2025, at which point 10% of the total ZINK supply would be distributed to early participants. Zink is SVM-compatible, keeping it within the broader Solana ecosystem while giving ATMTA direct control over the infrastructure layer that runs Star Atlas.

Position in the Solana Ecosystem

Star Atlas is one of the most prominent and longest-running AAA gaming projects building on Solana. SAGE Labs runs on Solana mainnet through published program addresses, including the Galactic Marketplace program. Economic data, where available, points to meaningful on-chain activity relative to the gaming sector: the project reported an annual GDP of approximately $21.1 million and cumulative traded volume exceeding $68.3 million. ATMTA's investment in a purpose-built L1, a functioning on-chain economy with measurable player earnings, and an active DAO with treasury control places it among the most technically developed gaming projects in the Solana ecosystem. Whether the full Unreal Engine 5 game delivers on its AAA ambitions remains to be seen, but the infrastructure layer is live and operating.