Proving a blockchain’s performance claim by breaking it in public
Every chain says it is fast. We built a fully on-chain MMO and invited the world to try to break it.
- Client
- Somnia Network
- Role
- Head of Marketing, Improbable
- Period
- 2025
- Disciplines
- Strategy, Community, Content, Events
- Unique players onboarded during the testnet phase
- 70,000+
- Verified on-chain transactions processed
- 250M
- Organic impressions across social channels
- 150k+
Overview
In the run-up to mainnet, Somnia needed to do more than promise high performance — they needed to prove it. The market is full of “fast” blockchains, and very few can handle the demands of a real-time world without falling over.
The brief was to stress-test the network publicly and undeniably. So rather than write another whitepaper, we built Chunked: a fully on-chain voxel MMO, and invited the world to break it. Combining in-person activations at EthDenver with Discord town halls and X Spaces turned a technical testing phase into a community event that validated the technology and built a player base at the same time.
What was wrong, and what I did about it
Nobody believes a performance claim any more
Developers have heard “fastest blockchain” a thousand times. To engage them during the testnet we needed irrefutable proof that Somnia could handle real-time game logic — movement, mining, crafting — entirely on-chain without lag.
Show it instead of saying it
We developed Chunked in three weeks as a live proof of concept. Not a curated demo: a chaotic open sandbox where thousands of players could mine and build simultaneously, generating over 250 million transactions in a month. It stress-tested the network in the most public way available.
A testnet needs players, not spectators
Testnets attract passive observers. We needed to bootstrap an active community from nothing and hold it together through the bugs, updates and wipes that a testnet inevitably involves.
Anchor the campaign on live moments
We built the campaign around events — packed Discord community calls, technical deep-dives on X Spaces — so every update became something to turn up for. Each live session was then repurposed into guides, posts and clips, so one hour of conversation fuelled weeks of content across every channel.
From live operations to a content engine
The campaign worked because it closed the gap between technical live events and accessible content.
- Interactive community events
- Live X Spaces and Discord stages where developers could question our engineers directly. Not Q&As — live demonstrations where the community could influence the roadmap in real time.
- A repurposing flywheel
- Good conversations were not allowed to vanish. Technical Spaces became accessible posts such as “Unlocking the Future of Virtual Worlds”, and quest guides — how to craft your first pickaxe — helped players from outside crypto navigate an on-chain economy.
What it moved
70,000+
Unique users onboarded during the testnet phase
250M
Verified on-chain transactions processed
150k+
Organic impressions across MSquared social channels
We built Somnia to unlock the next generation of on-chain experiences, and Chunked is an incredible demonstration of that vision in action. It shows what’s possible when developers aren’t held back by performance limitations.