Why Stardust Isn’t Building Our Own Blockchain

A frequent question we get at Stardust is when are you building your own blockchain?  The answer is: we’re not. And here’s why.

The Stardust Thesis

Stardust is solely focused on allowing game developers to build faster and more effectively with NFTs. Instead of game developers focusing on blockchain – with Stardust, they can focus 100% of their resources on building their game. Specialization at its finest! This original hypothesis, now our thesis, has become the cornerstone of Stardust’s value-add to the biggest game developers, both native to web2 and web3.

The Complexities of Blockchain

Blockchains are like operating systems; each with its own unique set of benefits and costs. From the scalability trilemma, to composability and web3-native user interfaces, there are many new factors for game developers to consider when building Web3 games.

Some games might require faster transaction speeds while others might require more security and flexibility when it comes to the data that is stored on-chain. By keeping a blockchain agnostic approach, Stardust can offer game developers the ability to choose the blockchain that best fits the needs of their game.

There are incredible blockchains and scaling solutions in the market today – fast, scalable, cheap and secure. Stardust’s thesis is all about Web3 specialization for game developers, and we’d be hypocritical to not partner with the greatest blockchain teams in the world to allow game developers to integrate their technology. One, singular, focus, NFTs in games and tools to better monetize.

While there are benefits to building our own chain – gas costs and more, blockchains are becoming 10x better every 12 months. As an example, Ethereum’s scaling issues are being resolved through different types of rollup implementations (Optimistic and ZK). In addition, other L1, and L2 solutions for scaling have emerged as well. Any marginal benefit Stardust would gain from building or leveraging our own technology would be short lived. The market would innovate past it and our technological improvements would become obsolete.

The Stripe Example

A good way to think about this decision is to look at Stripe. When they started in 2010, they had the opportunity to build their own payment processor, with their own API attached – but realized that building a payment processor was not their core competency.  

Stripe went with a completely different approach. Rather than trying to build their own payment processing infrastructure, they decided to partner with existing providers like Mastercard, Visa, and more. This allowed them to create a great experience for developers that leveraged all existing payment gateways, and not forcing developers to leverage Stripe’s own. The result: a great payments processing platform that focuses on usability for developers.

What this also enabled Stripe to do is build an ecosystem that continues to provide value on top of these rails through other features – fraud detection (radar), programmatic banking (treasury), and tax, to name just a few.

This “hub and spoke” model is the core tenet of all SaaS businesses and is something that Stardust seeks to do as we continue to build more Web3 value for developers to leverage the NFTs integrated into games with the easy Stardust API.

The Stardust Approach

For Stardust to best serve game developers in Web3, we must take our external thesis and apply it internally as well. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to mint, manage, and trade NFTs in games so that developers can focus on what they do best – building great games.

There are incredible blockchains out there with amazing teams tackling the hardest problems in the world. Stardust would be doing itself a disservice to try and compete with them, and in our humble opinion, they are better than us at building core blockchain technology.

As we’ve done thus far and will continue to do, Stardust will partner with leading blockchains to enable Web3 game development to integrate NFTs into games.

About Stardust

Stardust is a SaaS, blockchain agnostic, platform that offers a seamless “low code” integration of NFTs for game studios. To learn more, you can schedule time with our sales team here.

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