EVM compatibility for games and MUD on Starknet?

Absolutely, the 2 million $STRK grant to Realms by the Starknet Foundation is a thrilling development, reinforcing Starknet as a burgeoning hub for decentralized gaming ecosystems. Your journey from ETHDenver to ETHGlobal London, and then to the HK Web3 Festival vividly illustrates the vibrant community backing Starknet despite the hiccups like the airdrop controversy.

Your experiences at the Autonomous Anonymous conference in Lisbon, particularly with the game ‘Downstream Utopia’, highlight an exciting yet challenging aspect of Starknet—its gaming ecosystem’s unique dynamics. While it’s great to see individual games like ‘Dope War’ and ‘Loot Survivor’ getting attention, the broader developer engagement is crucial for a truly vibrant gaming landscape. That’s why we at Reddio have developed “Itachi”, a developer-friendly decentralized modular sequencer framework that’s now open source.

Itachi is built on the modular Yu framework and written in Golang, offering unparalleled flexibility and customization for developers, especially in the gaming sector. Itachi supports various VMs including CairoVM and developers can easily port EVM over to Itachi, making it an ideal choice for developers looking to build or transition into Starknet’s ecosystem. Meanwhile, we do notice the challenge for developers to move from Solidity to Cairo, esp. for a technical stack like MUD, we encourage developers to port EVM over, so that your whole technical stack will work smoothly together with your gaming logic written on top of MUD. You can launch your own Appchain on L3 powered by Itachi with EVM on top of Starknet.

By leveraging Itachi’s capabilities, developers can craft games on L3 EVM on top of Starknet, later on they can switch to Starknet L3 fully with reduced latency and lower gas fees, potentially solving some of the barriers you mentioned, like the Cairo language learning curve. Our vision aligns with building open, permissionless worlds—not walled gardens. We believe Itachi can serve as a bridge for more developers to enter the Starknet ecosystem, initially using Solidity and gradually transitioning to Cairo for more complex needs. That’s how we see Itachi can unleash Games on fractal scaling with no limitations.

We’re eager to see more developers join this initiative, experimenting with Itachi to create engaging, composable games that thrive on Starknet and beyond. For those interested in exploring further, Itachi’s source code is available, and we’re currently welcoming contributions and feedback to enhance its features.

Let’s build worlds where adventurers from one game can seamlessly venture into another, crafting a truly interconnected universe of games. If this vision excites you, we’d love to collaborate and see what worlds we can build together.