How Xai became the world's most scalable gaming blockchain

The Web3 gaming industry is no stranger to innovation. With the promise of decentralized economies, player-owned assets, and onchain mechanics, the landscape is evolving at breakneck speed. This traditionally comes with significant tradeoffs, but our friends at Xai are leading the pack without compromising scalability or player experience.

Xai on Rollup.wtf (along with our other friends)

Meet Xai

Xai is a Layer 3 blockchain for gaming built on Arbitrum. Their mission: onboard the next billion gamers into Web3 without compromising on the experience gamers expect. Designed to handle real-world economies and massive player bases, traditional gamers can own and trade valuable in-game items without even needing a crypto wallet.

Their journey began in 2023 when their founding team recognized a fundamental problem: Web3 gaming can’t gain mass adoption due to high player friction caused by technical barriers.

• Unscalable: Existing blockchains couldn’t support the high transaction volumes needed for dynamic multiplayer games.
• Developer accessibility: Developers lacked tools to create and manage on-chain game economies, which was complex, costly, and time-consuming.
• High costs: Gas fees made carrying out in-game actions expensive for players, making engagement prohibitive.
• Poor player experience: Players faced clunky, unintuitive blockchain interactions and needed to manage complex crypto wallets.

In January 2024, Xai Mainnet was launched to address these issues holding back growth in the gaming ecosystem.

Launching a new chain

Building any new chain comes with a crucial requirement: an indexer to enable access to your chain’s onchain data.

As Xai approached mainnet, the team sought best-in-class solutions across the entire infrastructure stack. After exploring several options, they chose Goldsky as their official indexing partner, leveraging the full suite of Goldsky's products:

• Goldsky Subgraphs to power core app indexing use cases
• Goldsky Mirror for high-performance, high-flexibility, low-latency games
• Goldsky Dash to understand network-level business metrics

Critically, Xai is making this infrastructure available not only for internal use, but for their entire ecosystem of approved developers, reducing the barriers to building on Xai.

Odyssey: The Ultimate Stress Test

In 2023, Xai launched their Odyssey campaign: their ultimate showcase and scalability stress test; proof that they could deliver on their promises while driving engagement across the industry. It was a multi-week campaign executed in partnership with Galxe, with daily and weekly quests for players to experience the multitude of games being built on testnet.

Hundreds of thousands of users flooded the network with activity, resulting in ~500K connected wallets and millions of daily transactions—all of which generated transaction loads never seen before on EVM networks.

But this unprecedented surge exposed the limits of their traditional indexing infrastructure (i.e. subgraphs), which failed to keep up, threatening to derail the entire event. Xai needed to quickly find a solution before the launch flopped.

Dodging disaster in <72 hours

With the clock ticking, the Xai team turned to Goldsky. In less than 72 hours, they migrated their indexing infrastructure to Goldsky Mirror. Goldsky handled the massive spike in events with ease, ensuring uninterrupted operations.

Odyssey successfully handled nearly 5 million daily transactions and 100+ events per second, pushing Xai’s infrastructure to its limits, becoming a litmus test for performance under real-world conditions.

The success of Odyssey didn’t just validate Xai’s architecture, but demonstrated their ability to handle massive, real-time transactions—a feat unmatched in the gaming blockchain space. The campaign was a milestone in proving their chain could handle real-world gaming at scale.

“Goldsky has been a crucial partner as we scale, offering phenomenal support and impressive indexing capabilities that can handle our high TPS. Their team makes development straightforward and efficient, which has allowed us to focus on building the Xai ecosystem without worrying about infrastructure bottlenecks.” — Soban Saqib, Co-Founder of Xai

Visibility into one of Arbitrum's largest mints

In late 2024, Xai launched its Tiny Sentry Key sale to make participation in their Sentry Node network more accessible. By significantly lowering the cost of entry, Xai encouraged broader decentralization of the network's operations and security. The sale also introduced the Key Ambassador program, where key network participants could offer 5% discounts and earn referral rewards.

However, shortly before the launch of the sale, the Xai team realized there was a critical gap: ambassadors had no easy way to track their earnings in real time. Without a clear view of impact or rewards, there was a risk of confusion and disengagement, potentially undermining the sale’s momentum. To address this, Xai used Goldsky Dash to quickly build real-time, no-code dashboards of the sale:

• a public dashboard for Ambassadors to monitor their referrals and earnings over time
• an internal dashboard to monitor the health and progress of the mint

The dashboards provided critical visibility for Xai’s ecosystem and helped power the sale of over 60,000 keys and $4M+ in funding to the network—one of the largest mints in the Arbitrum ecosystem to date.

Since then, Xai has leveraged Goldsky Dash to monitor a number of key health metrics for the network, including user retention, churn, sybil activity, and more.

“Dash meant we could engage Ambassadors much more easily, keeping their attention — and their ecosystem’s attention — on the sale."

Empowering an ecosystem of builders

Scalability isn’t just a lofty goal. For Xai, it’s a reality. Xai now boasts the highest transactions per second (TPS) in the gaming blockchain space with an impressive 138.3 TPS at peak, consistently appearing in the top 10 on rollup.wtf and setting a new benchmark for performance.

Today, Goldsky’s infrastructure is the backbone of Xai’s broader ecosystem, powering indexers, analytics, and ecosystem applications for some of the most ambitious teams on the network. From competitive multiplayer games to expansive virtual economies, developers across the ecosystem leverage Goldsky to scale beyond what's typically possible in blockchain gaming.

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Scale your gaming ecosystem

👋🏻 Hey, we’re Goldsky. We solve complex data engineering challenges so that chains like Xai can focus on building trailblazing applications for their users.

If your indexer is hitting throughput limits (or will be 👀 ), give us a spin. Sign up for free or instantly schedule a call to see how we can help unblock your team. No credit card or forms to fill.