The creators of top blockchain game, Gods Unchained, have announced Immutable X, a decentralized exchange developed in partnership with StarkWare which will allow NFT trading to scale on Ethereum.

SYDNEY, Australia โ 8th May, 2020 โ Immutable , the company that builds and produces blockchain infrastructure and games, has announced a partnership with StarkWare , a leader in zero-knowledge proofs and blockchain scalability. The partnership is centered around Immutable X, a decentralized, non-custodial exchange coming later this year which will allow Immutableโs flagship trading card game, Gods Unchained , to scale its user base.
Immutable X will leverage StarkEx , StarkWareโs ZK-STARK-based scalability engine to offer players private transactions, instant settlement and zero gas fees for peer-to-peer trading of in-game items on Ethereum. Immutable X will support other games in the future.
Gods Unchained, which is led by the former game director of MTG Arena, was one of the highest-grossing blockchain games of 2019. Gods Unchained has logged millions of games during its ongoing beta and set a record on Ethereum last November with over 3.7 million assets created in a 24 hour period.
The announcement of Immutable X comes when Gods Unchained, which is currently in beta, is set to launch its first season and begin marketing towards mainstream audiences.
With this projected increase in player numbers, Immutable X is being introduced to overcome limitations on the number of non-fungible token transactions Ethereum can currently support, which is approximately 150,000 per day at 30% network usage.
Immutable X will be able to support more than 200 million trades per day while consuming less than 30% of Ethereumโs capacity. Crucially, Immutable X will be non-custodial; users will be able to trade their assets without trusting the security of Immutableโs infrastructure.
โImmutable X is the missing piece in bringing blockchain gaming to mainstream audiences,โ said Alex Connolly, CTO at Immutable. โGods Unchained has proven that users are excited by true ownership in games, and that it is possible to build a high-quality blockchain game on Ethereum.
Immutable X will enable Gods Unchained and other blockchain games to reach the scale we know theyโre capable of.โ
Since its inception, StarkWare has been focused on solving the scalability problem of permissionless blockchains. Its StarkEx Layer-2 scalability engine has already demonstrated the ability to process over 9,000 non-custodial trades/sec. Furthermore, the StarkEx software stack is no longer limited by blockchain resources, but rather by the magnitude of its cloud-based prover service.
StarkEx has settled almost 20 million transactions on a public Ethereum testnet in recent weeks, in preparation for the first commercial deployment of StarkEx, powering a (fungible) cryptocurrency exchange.
โWeโre big fans of Gods Unchained and Immutableโs powerful team,โ said Uri Kolodny, co-founder & CEO of StarkWare. โNFT-based games are an exciting crypto-native application.
Gods Unchainedโs huge success requires a scalability engine that can carry the load and StarkEx is up to the task. StarkEx will start out by scaling trading, and will quickly expand to scale trustless minting of in-game assets.โ
About Immutable
Immutable is an Australian-based company and market leader in blockchain gaming. Through the Immutable Platform, the company is bringing transparency to the opaque world of in-game economies and providing gamers with true digital property rights. They are showcasing these advancements through Gods Unchained , a play-to-earn, AAA trading card game directed by the former director of Magic The Gathering: Arena, Chris Clay.
About StarkWare
StarkWare develops ZKP technology to solve two of the biggest problems of blockchains: scalability and privacy. Focusing on scalability, StarkWare has the fastest in-class technology for asserting computational integrity via succinct, transparent and post-quantum-secure proofs.
Immutable Website: https://immutable.com
Gods Unchained Website: https://godsunchained.com
Contact:
Chris Bowden, Marketing Director @ Immutable
chris.bowden@immutable.com
Shiri Perciger, Head of Marketing @ StarkWare Industries
shiri@starkware.co
This reminds me of the Enjin sidechain Effinity which is also intended to help scale transactions in blockchain games. These developments are extremely promising and although full adoption is a ways off, are quite necessary at this time.