Boba’s main focus is on gaming, NFTs, and metaverse via Hybrid Compute. Hybrid Compute is a key feature that allows developers to leverage existing Web2 tooling for more powerful computation and data usage.
Activity on Boba BNB’s ROVI Network drove average daily transactions up 1,390% QoQ to 130,000. Boba BNB accounted for 99% of all Boba Network transactions.
Despite a decrease in BOBA’s price, revenue (in USD) grew 90.5% QoQ due to increased transaction volume.
Bobabeam (Moonbeam) was deprecated in May.
Primer on Boba Network
Boba Network is a Layer-2 multichain scaling solution with a focus on gaming. Boba operates on Ethereum, BNB, and Avalanche, and it is maintained by Enya Labs. As an optimistic rollup (OR) based on Optimism’s codebase, Boba offers:
Reduced gas fees
Increased transaction throughput
L1 security guarantees
EVM compatibility for smart contracts, such as NFTs and decentralized finance (DeFi)
This network also has unique features that set it apart from other ORs and Optimism forks:
Hybrid Compute — the ability to connect to off-chain computational resources, data, and APIs
Multichain focus
Fast exit bridging to L1
DAO governance
Boba’s combination of features — specifically Hybrid Compute — enables decentralized applications (dapps) to:
run at a fraction of the cost of L1 dapps
leverage off-chain computation via Web2 APIs, and
provide the multichain solutions needed for blockchain gaming.
Boba Network was previously active on Fantom and Moonbeam, but those implementations have since been deprecated.
The quantitative data in this report focuses on the Ethereum, BNB, and Avax implementations of Boba Network unless stated otherwise. Bobabeam (Moonbeam) wound down during Q2, so it has been excluded.
Performance Analysis
Network Overview
Network activity on Boba Network was a mixed bag in Q2. Average daily transactions was the standout metric, increasing 1,390% QoQ from 8,700 to 130,000. ROVI Network, a multi-purpose “super app,” was responsible for this drastic increase (more details in the Ecosystem Overview section). Despite this massive increase in overall transactions, daily active addresses declined 18.8% QoQ. ROVI Network’s forwarder executes transactions on behalf of users that transact gaslessly, so it barely affects the unique contract callers metric.
Boba BNB quickly found adoption with various types of dapps, leading Boba implementations in nearly all activity metrics. In Q2, Boba BNB had 65.9% active address dominance.
ROVI Network is overwhelmingly responsible for the increase in transaction activity in Q2. Boba BNB reached 1 million cumulative transactions in April. By the end of Q2, Boba BNB had processed 12.5 million cumulative transactions. For reference, Boba Ethereum has processed just over 1 million transactions since deployment in 2021. ROVI Network was responsible for 11.78 million of 11.83 total transactions in Q2.
The average transaction fee decreased 86.6% QoQ to $0.0054, roughly half a cent. This was primarily due to increased transaction dominance by Boba BNB, which had much lower fees than Boba Ethereum.
Financial Overview
BOBA’s price declined 45.0% QoQ, lagging behind the total crypto market cap’s increase of 0.4%. BOBA is the native asset of Boba Network, and its primary use case is settling network fees.
Revenue (in BOBA) is measured as total L2 fees minus total L1 sequencer fees. It grew 246.6% QoQ to 238,600 BOBA, but denominated in USD, revenue grew 90.5% QoQ. This increase came primarily from Boba BNB, as the high transaction volume brought in more L2 fees as L1 sequencer fees stayed relatively stable.
Ecosystem Overview
Average daily contract calls increased by nearly 1,400% in Q2; this metric is heavily attributed to “super app” ROVI Network. Unique contract callers and unique contracts called declined 25.0% and 1.5% QoQ, respectively. Due to the architecture of ROVI Network, increased user interaction only scales the total contract calls metric and not unique contracts or contract caller metrics. ROVI Network’s forwarder contract affects contract call metrics the same way it affects active address metrics, skewing them downwards.
While Boba Ethereum lost dominance in terms of daily active addresses, its established ecosystem dating back to 2021 continued to have many more dapps and contracts than Boba BNB or Boba Avax. This relationship may explain the disproportionate 63% dominance of unique contracts called on Boba Ethereum in Q2, as users have more options to interact with.
The major increase in total contract calls starting in February 2022 came from the same addresses becoming more active, specifically ROVI Network’s forwarder contract. Boba BNB is responsible for the majority of daily unique contract callers (76.5% dominance) and total contract calls (99.6% dominance) in Q2.
ROVI Network
ROVI Network is a multi-purpose infrastructure app that drives the majority of transaction activity on Boba BNB and the Boba Network as a whole. ROVI offers a social recovery wallet, an on/off ramp, and gasless transactions to create a familiar UX for both Web3 and Web2 users. Its token, which has 27,000 holders, is used for rewards and staking.
ROVI calls itself a “super app” because it packages many features into a single solution, like WeChat for the blockchain. ROVI integrates crypto through several pieces of infrastructure.
Messaging, such as with existing platforms WhatsApp and Telegram, via Keyboard91.
Financial services, such as payments, trading crypto, and earning yield on stables, via M91 Super App.
In Q2, three ROVI contracts accounted for 99.9% of all Boba BNB transactions:
The ROVI Forwarder contract had 6.1 million transactions addressed to it
The M91 token contract had 5.0 million transactions addressed to it
The ROVI token contract had 0.7 million transactions addressed to it
Gaming
MegaWorld launched in Q1’23 and continued to ship new features from its extensive roadmap. One upcoming game is Katana Inu, a player-versus-player (PvP) battle royale game that incorporates NFTs and fungible tokens. The team has released a demo and is working towards its PC beta launch. Homie Wars, a mobile-first, metaverse, battle-to-earn game, launched in Q2. Other games on Boba Network include METAFORRA, Cosmic Universe, and EvoVerses.
NFTs
Many games in development on Boba Network, such as Cosmic Universes, EvoVerses, and Katana Inu, plan to integrate NFTs into gameplay. Boba will likely experience more NFT activity as games approach their respective mainnets.
Cosmic Universe is working towards its pre-alpha phase, which will include integrations for the more than 10,000 existing character and land NFTs.
DeFi
TVL (USD) declined for the fifth consecutive quarter, down 17.0% QoQ to $3.4 million. Boba Ethereum still accounted for the vast majority of Boba Network TVL with over 90% dominance. Its dominance is largely due to Boba BNB and Boba Avax being relatively new (deployed in H2 2022) and Boba Network fully pivoting to becoming a gaming chain. As a gaming chain, TVL is not as representative a metric for the overall state of the ecosystem as it is with many other chains.
OolongSwap, the first native DEX on Boba, and Symbiosis, a cross-chain AMM and bridge, are the second and third largest DeFi protocols, respectively, with 22% and 10% TVL dominance. Symbiosis completed its cross-promotion with Rubic to airdrop Galxe NFTs to users in April.
Qualitative Analysis
Key Events
Noteworthy events from Q2 include:
Bobabeam was deprecated in May. Bobabeam did not host much activity, so development resources were reallocated to the other implementations.
Boba Network’s $1 million bug bounty was updated to include a broader scope of submissions.
Witnet deployed a decentralized oracle on Boba BNB.
Caesar’s Temple, a play-to-earn metaverse game, is being developed.
Multichain Approach
Bobabeam wound down and was deprecated on May 25. Bobabeam was Boba Network’s Layer-2 scaling solution on Moonbeam and the first of its kind in the ecosystem. This move was made to give additional focus to more active Boba Network implementations.
As newer implementations see more activity, they also receive adoption from ecosystem tools. Covalent and DefiLlama now support Boba BNB and Boba Avax, in addition to Boba Ethereum, which they’ve supported its launch in 2021.
Hybrid Compute and Gaming
Boba Network aims to be the leading solution for gaming and metaverse applications via its Hybrid Compute feature. This feature intends to solve the problem of closed-off blockchain ecosystems. As it stands, blockchains cannot use any data or compute from outside of their ecosystem without an API or oracle. With Hybrid Compute, developers can:
Create advanced algorithms that are typically too expensive to run on-chain.
Get millisecond response times.
Generate random numbers and other resources that typically carry security concerns in decentralized computational environments.
Access low-cost storage, image, and audio processing.
Connect to external gaming services such as Unreal Engine.
Instantly mint NFTs based on game activity.
View offchain price feeds (e.g., CoinGecko) to create variable pricing/actions.
With Hybrid Compute, developers can leverage legacy Web2 systems and solutions to build higher-quality blockchain games. For example, Boba Avax adopted Avalanche games such as METAFORRA, Cosmic Universe, and EvoVerses, which can now leverage off-chain compute and Web2 APIs.
The Layer-2 Landscape
Arbitrum and Optimism, fellow optimistic rollups, still heavily dominate the L2 space with 58% and 27% of the TVL market share, respectively. Boba Network holds <1% of the L2 TVL market share at $3.4 million. The number of daily active addresses, protocols deployed, and unique contracts on Boba are similarly behind the competition. Many zero-knowledge rollups (ZKRs), such as zkSync and Polygon zkEVM, recently reached mainnet, introducing more competition. However, the majority of L2s are general-purpose rollups, but Boba Network is gaming-focused.
Ethereum L2s, in general (specifically optimistic rollups), continue to gain adoption. Optimism, the project which Boba’s code is forked from, has made more contributions to its OP Stack, which benefits all users of the technology (Boba, Arbitrum, Base, and others). Enya Labs, core contributor to Boba Network, has made a significant contribution to Erigon, an L2 Bedrock OP Stack-compatible client. Enya’s contribution to Erigon includes implementing support for eth_getProof upstream, a complex feature that had remained unaddressed since its issue was opened in November 2020. This enhancement is crucial for any project aiming to leverage Erigon as an execution engine in the Optimism ecosystem. It’s particularly noteworthy as other projects have only been able to support running Bedrock as the replica. This distinction underscores the importance of Enya Labs’ work in augmenting the flexibility and diversity of the ecosystem.
Boba Network will benefit from compatible tooling from these adjacent ecosystems, as building with open-source technology is a positive-sum game. The greater ecosystem will even benefit from the adoption of L2s that use zero-knowledge proofs or off-chain data as they push UX in multiple directions, such as developments in account abstraction from zkSync and StarkNet.
Most other L2s are general-purpose protocols, but Boba Network remains steadily focused on gaming and metaverse. With its own specific use-case for gaming, its real competition is chains built by L2 engines Paima and StarkEx. Notably, ImmutableX, built on StarkEx, has over 100 games being developed on it. Boba’s Hybrid Compute remains the key differentiating factor between other L2 gaming platforms.
Boba Roadmap
The Boba community is very focused on educating more developers about Boba’s novel Hybrid Compute functionality. It seeks to onboard new developers to the community through hackathons and other events. The multichain approach itself has proven to also be a great tool to attract developers from new ecosystems. In addition, there are plans to continue adding new features rather than just educating developers about existing features. Enya Labs and Boba Network developers continued to explore two key roadmap items: parallel execution and account abstraction.
Parallel execution refers to optimizing (and moving away from) the EVM, which executes transactions serially, one before another. Executing in parallel (i.e., multiple transactions at once) comes with its own development challenges but would provide massive improvements in scalability. Many L1s have developed their own virtual machines that either fully parallelize or hybridize execution, such as Cardano and Solana. More recently, L2s have been moving away from the EVM to build custom VMs for scalability purposes, such as Fuel, zkSync, and StarkNet.
Account abstraction, just like parallel execution, is a common interest among Ethereum L2s. After child accounts are abstracted from a single main account, the main account can separately perform actions such as paying fees for its derived contract accounts. Within gaming, account abstraction allows for a smoother UX as the user doesn’t have to pay gas fees at every step. In fact, a protocol could completely subsidize fees without involving the user at all, either through treasury funds or some core contributor.
Closing Summary
Boba BNB remains the star of Boba Network, with its 1,584% QoQ increase in average daily transactions. ROVI Network, the main contributor to this increase, gained more traction in Q2 and may continue to do so as more roadmap items approach production. There is also a handful of gaming projects on Boba BNB and other implementations that also bring in new users, although not to the same degree.
Boba’s presence on multiple chains and its novel Hybrid Compute have already attracted a handful of games and dapps. By educating people about existing features, specifically Hybrid Compute, and developing new features, such as account abstractions, Boba will be well-positioned to draw in the next generation of builders.
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Red is a researcher, educator, and developer in the web3 space. Red's background is in electrical and software engineering. His main interest is privacy technology, through zero-knowledge proofs and general cryptography.
Red is a researcher, educator, and developer in the web3 space. Red's background is in electrical and software engineering. His main interest is privacy technology, through zero-knowledge proofs and general cryptography.
