Virtual Labs' Roadmap

Account abstraction, high real yield, and complete Cross-Chain Compatibility are on the horizon in Virtual Labs' immediate future. We’ve made great progress towards our mission statement of delivering real utility with simple UX to the masses with our first product in just the past few weeks and months. Let’s see how we’ll accelerate this from here🚀

The Highlights

• Virtual Labs' Virtual Rollup SDK solves the problem of gas, latency, and UX within recurring transactions
• Virtual Rollups will continue to support more chains, devices, and languages before passing auditing to launch on mainnet
• Virtual Labs will then add native AA, APY, or Cross-Chain Compatibility as our next large product. We’re excited to hear your thoughts on these possible directions!
• Two exciting future products…

Our Roadmap Progress

In the past few months, we’ve gotten into position, securing key investments, team members, and plans. In August, we turned this preparation into product with the quiet and then public launch of our Virtual Rollups SDK. So far, we’ve delivered seamless UX, free gas, and latency-free transactions to over a dozen games-real utility to real projects with large user bases.

We’re thrilled to have reached early product-market fit with our partners’ excitement indicating that dApps with better UX truly can appeal to new types of users and increase engagement with existing players. While our mission is not nearly complete, this is a reassuring sign we are on the right path.

Virtual Rollups and AA, APY, or CCC

The most demanded feature of our low-code UX SDK has been account abstraction, further removing the user away from the complexities of blockchain. Cross-Chain Compatibility does this too, as educating oneself on safe bridging practices before one can play a game is not exactly conducive to an enjoyable experience.

APY is a bit different. The idea is, because collateral must be locked to display the virtual state channel balance and allow gasless trading, why not earn yield on this collateral? While some frequent users of Virtual Labs and Virtual Labs partner games will keep this collateral locked in between game sessions, most will withdraw and redeposit for the next game. This is understandable, but does reduce the convenience and UX of the system.

The idea here is if TVL is high and consistent enough, some proportion could be designated to Lido or RocketPool and earn yield for the Virtual Labs users, partners, and DAO.

Going back to AA, this feature’s utility is obvious as seed phrases are too scary and complicated for non-maxi adoption. Web3 games that can be entered in a single click will have a massive advantage over those that add minutes of friction to onboarding-the solution is not education, but simplification. This is why we’re exploring partnerships with three of the largest AA platforms!

We think that in such a collaborative space, it might make the most sense to integrate and offer great UX features together! It would also allow us to go right into building another killer app, like CCC.

Virtual Lab’s Cross-Chain Compatibility is when one user can enter and play a game with another player on a different chain, without them knowing or needing to care that they lack a base consensus layer. This would function via atomic swaps. Where the player’s native chain EOA controls a wallet on another chain that would receive winnings or place bets. Below is a high-level run through of how it would work, but the end goal is the user does not need to care about what chain to use, and for the project: integrating Virtual Labs means integrating unlimited chains, expanding their reach.

‍

While we’ll likely build all three in the future, Virtual Labs will create the most desired feature in Q4 of this year. If you’re an Virtual Labs partner or Ontrooper, tweet your opinion!

The Future Ahead

There are two exciting upcoming Virtual Labs products! The first is Virtual Wallet, set to launch next month in September. Virtual Labs Network is a consumer application which implements Virtual Rollups across multiple channels, chains, and applications.

Essentially, Virtual Wallet is meant to demonstrate the power of instant, seamless and gasless transactions to anyone that has a wallet, and not just those on the enterprise side. Those who use the Virtual Wallet will experience no gas, minimal latency, and no friction, made possible through Virtual Balances. They’ll be able to send transactions to anyone, on their same chain to start, even if the receiving user is not net on the Virtual Wallet.

The Virtual Wallet has even more purposes:

Connect Virtual Rollup protocols-so that partner games are also connected without gas and latency-and serve as the beginning of a Virtual Rollups consensus layer.

Whoa! What is that? This leads us to our second upcoming product:

OpenChannel: Virtual Labs as a load balancer of blockchains. Virtual Rollups are exceptional at overcoming the limits of the blockchain in terms of UX, cost, and compute, but only within recurring relationships, like game lobbies and social networks. Our goal is to expand this possibility to everywhere. We can’t say much on this idea, coming between late 2024 and early 2025, but it involves ZK recursive memory, user-self validation, and utilizing the best of the compute and storage of all of the L1s and L2 out there!

Thank you for reading! To stay updated, follow me and Virtual Labs on Twitter and subscribe below to receive next week’s article directly in your inbox. 

And share with a friend if you enjoyed!