Sorare
“Our vision was always to make NFTs mainstream, and we wanted to be able to sell assets at $10 or $5, but gas costs were prohibitive… Today, we are paying almost zero gas fees. It means we can mainstream NFTs. “
Pierre Duperrin
Blockchain Architect
Sorare’s soccer game has thrilled sports fans internationally since launching in 2019. Sorare has built a global fantasy soccer game, with a crypto-twist. Almost overnight, StarkWare technology brought this top gaming company savings of close to $1M-a-week.
Raising gas prices on Ethereum meant we were paying a million dollars in gas fees per week – but we didn’t want to leave Ethereum.
When you buy something, you own it. If you buy a physical football collectible, it’s yours forever, and this should be true for digital assets. We believe this strongly and want people to have the kind of ownership and transparency for Sorare cards that only blockchain can provide. Despite the rise in gas fees, we wanted to continue providing cards through Ethereum, as we believe that it’s the most decentralized and secure blockchain.
Choosing StarkWare
We could have chosen a sidechain, but side chains don’t offer the same level of security and decentralization as Ethereum. It became clear that we were looking for an L2 scaling solution. We felt ZK-rollups are the technology of the future.
STARKs have interesting mathematical properties and provide transparency and high scalability. But what we liked most about StarkEx was that it had been live with real apps, such as DeversiFi, for more than a year. This made us comfortable migrating to a very new technology.
Documentation and support
The amount of documentation and explanation available on StarkWare’s website and from StarkWare on Medium is really helpful. This gave us a lot of confidence. We signed a contract in mid-April and started working on integration. It took us just under three months to complete the migration.
The process went very smoothly. We had looked at the flows and understood how it would work. We have a Slack channel open with StarkWare, where the staff was very helpful. The integration went very well and quickly brought benefits. Before the migration, settlement of trades between users could take a few hours, and up to a day when there was a surge in gas prices. Now, almost everything is instant. The few hiccups were smoothed out quickly
Making saving; mainstreaming NFTs
Our vision was always to make NFTs mainstream, and we wanted to be able to sell assets at $10 or $5, but gas costs were prohibitive. That’s why we decided to look for an L2 solution. Today, we are paying almost zero gas fees. It means we can mainstream NFTs.
Now, we are able to sell many more cards at lower prices. Previously, it cost 2,000 Euro to build a team; with new cards; we have brought this down to 200–300 Euro. We still have the very expensive cards, but we now offer an entry-level account which means you can play with less investment.
This would not be possible if we hadn’t moved to StarkEx.
