Can gaming break free from the constraints of traditional platforms and early onchain networks? The practical advantages of crypto gaming provide the answer: Open financial systems, player-driven economies, and aligned communities are redefining the industry.

B3, a Caldera-powered L3 built on Base, shows this future in action. Its success, fueled by Caldera’s rollup platform, reveals how custom appchains can create new earning opportunities for game developers, lower costs, improve shared liquidity through the Metalayer, and encourage interoperability with other rollups. By relying on transparent decentralized infrastructure, studios can work without costly corporate intermediaries, while players earn rewards through gameplay, building ownership that connects them to the game’s success.

B3’s growth, with over 260 million transactions and 6.6 million wallet addresses since its August 2024 launch, proves the scalability of this model, setting a path for larger studios to follow. Inspired by decades of gaming passion, B3’s founders draw from personal memories, like grinding in titles like Diablo II, to create a world where players and developers flourish together.

Powering a new Golden Era of Gaming

B3 is an L3 blockchain built and settled on Base, launched by NPC Labs and the Player1 Foundation in August 2024. The platform emerged as a direct response to challenges faced by game developers on Base, specifically high transaction costs and insufficient publisher support.

Founded by ex-Coinbase and ex-Base team members including CEO Daryl Xu, co-founder Viktoriya Hying, and CTO Sean Geng, B3 operates with a lean team of approximately 20 people. This agile structure mirrors the approach used to launch Base, focusing on solving practical problems for developers rather than building unnecessary infrastructure.

B3 was designed as a gaming-first ecosystem after recognizing that Base's blockspace competition was driving gaming transaction costs too high. The platform inherits Base's cost and throughput advantages while providing specialized support for gaming applications. In February 2025, B3 launched its native $B3 token, marking a significant milestone in its vision to build a gaming superchain serving 3 billion players worldwide.

B3 addresses industry gatekeeping and fragmentation by fostering an open gaming ecosystem where GameChains integrate seamlessly. This approach, detailed in the B3 Whitepaper, encourages cooperation through shared incentives. B3's user frontend, bsmnt.fun, serves as a discoverability hub that has attracted 300,000 active users engaging with games ranging from nostalgic titles like Pong to modern offerings such as Sol Arena.

B3's key metrics (as of March 17, 2025) demonstrate its success:

• 261,997,200 total transactions processed

• 6,640,971 unique addresses supported since launch

• Daily active wallets peaked at over 200,000 in November 2024

• Transaction volume reached approximately 2 million per day at peak periods

• 1.5 million users have engaged with games on the platform to become eligible for rewards

The platform has launched specialized GameChains like Parallel’s PRIME, which hosts titles such as Sanctuary, a third-person shooter. B3 has also established strategic collaborations with studios like InfiniGods to expand the blockchain gaming ecosystem. The platform's economic model redistributes 30% of onchain revenue to developers who share users, ensuring mutual growth and alignment of incentives.

As NPC Labs (core contributor to B3), Daryl states, “Caldera delivers the speed, reliability, and scalability that B3 Open Gaming needs to onboard millions of players and developers. Their infrastructure is the key to making open gaming a reality.” 

Caldera’s Strengths

Caldera provides a rollup platform with one click deployment, supporting over 100 production rollups and processing over 400 million cumulative transactions. Its customizable L3 infrastructure offers high throughput, low costs, and interoperability solutions like the Metalayer. Integration with Base provides Ethereum security, Optimism’s OP stack infrastructure, and Coinbase’s onramp, easing web2 to web3 transitions.

Caldera supports B3 by reducing development effort, allowing creators to concentrate on game design, as outlined in the Whitepaper. With Caldera’s rollup engine, B3 launched easily and scaled quickly, driving transaction volume from near zero to over 260 million in seven months, with daily active wallets reaching 200,000. This growth highlights Caldera’s scalability impact. In the future, gaming platforms might choose ephemeral rollups for short-lived events like tournaments, all enabled by Caldera’s flexible infrastructure.

The global gaming market was valued at $240 billion in 2023 and is expected to reach $583 billion by 2030. Roblox alone generated $2.2 billion in revenue from digital asset sales in 2022. With a 13% annual growth rate across industries, the gaming industry is ready to embrace the onchain shift. Caldera is ready to absorb this inflow, offering significantly lower costs to deploy a rollup compared to launching a standalone L1. 

Additionally, Caldera’s Metalayer protocol will allow users to withdraw funds from B3 instantly, bypassing the typical seven-day bridging delay required for Optimistic rollups. Lastly, the Metalayer will enable interoperability between B3 gamechains like PRIME and InfiniGods so players easily move funds between the two ecosystems as if they were changing game cartridges.

Why Gaming Platforms Need an Appchain

General-purpose L2s like Base attract a wide audience but fall short for gaming needs. They aren’t optimized for real-time mechanics or smooth user experiences. Base’s popularity creates challenges:

• Blockspace competition cuts app earnings and leads to unpredictable gas costs.

• Rising demand drives up transaction fees for gaming.

• Bridging issues, such as seven-day delays and wrapped tokens, make the user experience more difficult.

Appchains address these problems effectively. They allow B3 to control blockspace and fees, redirect MEV, and focus on gaming priorities. Custom L3s support a wide range of gameplay, from MMOs to casual titles, by using Caldera’s horizontal scaling to avoid L2 congestion. B3 creates a shared open gaming ecosystem, reducing fragmentation as outlined in its Whitepaper, with support from the Metalayer vision. The PRIME launch overcame L2 limits, setting a standard for gaming projects. Since August 2024, B3 has reached a peak of 30 transactions per second and kept a near-100% success rate, proving the scalability and reliability of appchains.

The Open Gaming Vision and Why Rollups Should Deploy on Caldera

Crypto gaming shifts the industry from studios selling endless in-game items to player-led economies where studios gain royalties from active marketplaces. Built on open infrastructure, this approach welcomes diverse developers, ensures clear asset tracking, and reduces dependence on corporate intermediaries and their high fees. B3’s open gaming method aligns with Caldera’s goal of opening opportunities through shared incentives like the referral system and $B3 token pool, while Sprinter simplifies access. As a discovery platform, B3 welcomes games from any chain, building strong communities with cross-chain connections. With 1.5 million unique users joining to earn rewards through gameplay, B3 draws web2 gamers, creating dedicated supporters whose interests match the game’s success, much like Ethereum’s community.

Picture a gaming rollup flourishing with top performance, smooth experiences, and communities growing through shared incentives. Caldera’s Rollup Platform makes this real, offering solutions designed for gaming that ensure low latency for real-time play and micro-transactions to keep players involved. Caldera supports short-lived events like tournaments, providing flexible infrastructure for future needs. The Metalayer connects B3 ecosystems like PRIME and InfiniGods to a wider network, enabling seamless player experiences across chains. With transaction costs as low as a fraction of a cent, creators can focus on designing immersive worlds that captivate global audiences. 

Caldera is one of the fastest-growing rollup ecosystems on Ethereum, handling 400 million transactions to date, empowering web3 teams to launch high-performance, adaptable appchains. Dozens of leading EVM chains, including Manta, Apechain, Kinto, Injective, RARI Chain and Zero Network by Zerion, use Caldera’s trusted Rollup Platform to enjoy unified connections across all leading frameworks.

Caldera’s rollup platform, boosting B3 with scalability, cost savings, and interoperability, builds a thriving future for players and developers. We invite gaming creators to deploy on Caldera, building on B3’s success. Visit Caldera’s deployment page and explore the Metalayer preview to start creating today.