The Birth of Endurance

This is a memo-style article that outlines our decision-making logic behind creating Endurance in its historical context. Due to its length, there aren’t many technical details described.

Endurance officially launched on January 31, 2023, as an EVM-compatible Layer1.

Before this, we were making cool stuff like NFTs. In 2022, we made three big NFT Collections for our game Fusionist and put them on Ethereum and BNB Chain. We also made a website so people could join in easily.

As a result, ~200,000 accounts joined our Twitter/Discord community.

These numbers were considered significant in the Gamefi community at that time. As newcomers to the industry, we eagerly hoped that these figures would withstand public scrutiny.

What’s the solution? A decentralized and transparent blockchain! We naively thought at the time: if every active wallet could leave an interaction record on a blockchain daily, wouldn’t that fully prove it’s an external user?¹

So, the question arose: which chain should we choose?

First, we ruled out directly operating on Ethereum due to the cost of a simple contract interaction, which ranged from a few cents to several dollars. And our website statistics showed a DAU (Daily Active Users) of 200,000. Simple multiplication indicates that the daily proof of activity cost would be tens of thousands of dollars! (Even now, with the popularization of L2 reducing gas fees by an order of magnitude, it’s still a significant amount.)

We had no reason to make our users pay this fee, nor did we see the justification to continuously burn through our investors’ money like this.

The remaining options were:

• Less expensive public chains like Polygon, BNB Chain, Solana, etc.
• Chains like the subnets introduced by Avalanche at the time, which although autonomous, still required a “membership fee.”

These options were feasible, but there was an evident downside: these chains were not rising stars. In their long-term competition with Ethereum, they didn’t have any particular advantages and historically were always in a chasing position. I believed they would continue to be in this position in the future.

Given that our company views itself as exceptional with boundless potential, an immediate thought struck us: Why not us?

Thus, Endurance was born.

Once past the decision-making stage, Endurance became like a rolling stone, unburdened by past technological constraints, market setbacks, and previous partnerships, free to chart its own path forward.

We believe that in the coming years, the evolution of blockchain technology will continue in its current state of ‘many voices competing’, encompassing areas like L2 Scaling, Privacy, AA Wallet, Onchain Game, Modular, and so on without exception.

We’re well aware that the era of Web3 that truly belongs to the players hasn’t arrived yet. We don’t have the capacity to prematurely align with any single company and their technology.

Our current ’lean and agile’ tech stack and our ‘adaptable and flowing’ development path, may very well secure us a place in this era(greeting to dydx-chain!).

We’re just getting started!