Stomp Goes Live Beyond Pre-Alpha

Stomp, the fully onchain monster battler from veteran builder Owen Shen, has officially left pre-alpha. The team announced the milestone with the line "It's time," confirming that updated visuals, major gas optimizations, and more monsters in the pipeline are now live for anyone to try at stomp.gg.

The game is heavily inspired by monster RPGs in the vein of Pokemon, with what the studio calls the "crossover energy of Smash Bros." It is turn-based, 1v1, and runs on MegaETH, the high-throughput Ethereum Layer 2 designed for real-time onchain applications. Players build a team of monsters and battle other people in real time, with the entire match state committed to chain.

The roster pulls heavily from web3-native intellectual property. Stomp is launching with monsters themed around bulls, hypurrs, ghouls, miladies, llamas and more, alongside originals named Aurox, Ekineki, Ghouliath, Malalien, and Nirvamma. The promotional art for the alpha exit features a battle scene between Ekineki and Gorillax.

Why Shen Says It Is Time to Try Again

The release was paired with a long blog post titled "make onchain Fun again," in which Shen lays out a forensic case for why the previous generation of web3 games failed and why Stomp is structured to avoid the same trap.

His argument starts with a numbers problem. He points out that teams across the last cycle collectively raised hundreds of millions of dollars to fund games and studios, citing the recent shutdowns of Pirate Nation, ChronoForge, projects from Lattice, the Runiverse Game, Crabada, and others as a graveyard the industry has built itself. The diagnosis is a mismatch between game economics and venture economics. Indie game success can sit anywhere from 10,000 dollars to 10 million dollars, and crypto's liquidity premium plus large NFT-funded warchests pushed starting valuations so high that all moderately positive outcomes got priced out.

To justify those valuations, Shen argues, studios pivot in one of two directions. They either become game studios with a portfolio of half-baked titles meant to demonstrate combined playerbase, or they issue digital assets long before those assets can do anything productive. Both paths, in his framing, lead to the same dead end. Multi-game portfolios produce low-quality work because nothing gets polished. Premature asset issuance attracts speculators who hype valuations above anything the eventual game can justify, and then the team is stuck trying to ship something that supports an 8-figure market cap.

Layer in the base rate (most indie games fail) and what Shen calls the second most entitled user group after airdrop farmers (gamers themselves), and the path forward looks deliberately narrow. His own framing is that you have to be "kinda crazy" to keep trying. He volunteered.

What Stomp Actually Is

Mechanically, Stomp is a 1v1 turn-based monster battler with real-time matchmaking. Players collect monsters, build a team, and queue against another human. The match is fully onchain on MegaETH, which is the part of the design that does the heavy lifting both technically and culturally.

The technical sketch from Shen, ahead of a full developer blog, gives an idea of how the team got something playable inside the EVM:

A hyper-experimental Solidity to TypeScript transpiler emulates the onchain execution in any JavaScript runtime, which lets the client predict outcomes before the chain confirms them.

Matchmaking and turn decisions are wrapped into a single onchain transaction using a commit-reveal flow, designed for very low overhead per move.

The contracts make heavy use of reused storage keys and inlining, and MegaETH's higher per-contract size limit allows deployments up to roughly 50 kilobytes. The slogan from the team is onchain maximalism where it matters and speed everywhere else.

Stomp sits inside a small but visible cluster of MegaETH games that took advantage of the chain's mainnet rollout. Bankless and Across Protocol have both flagged it alongside Showdown TCG, Smasher, Crossy Fluffle, Biomes, and Kumbaya as part of the early ecosystem. During MegaETH's January 2026 stress test, Stomp was one of the games that helped the network process roughly 10.7 billion onchain transactions in a few days, with industry observers noting that latency and congestion stayed low across all the live games.

The Builder Behind It

Stomp comes from 0xmons, the on-screen alias of Owen Shen. Shen is a serial Ethereum builder whose previous work has shaped some of the more durable corners of NFT infrastructure. He launched the original 0xmons project in 2021, an experimental NFT collection of neural-net-generated pixel monsters with on-chain encoding and an ERC-20 staking token called XMON. He also built SudoSwap, the peer-to-peer NFT exchange protocol that has become the default trading rail for several onchain gaming ecosystems, including Kamigotchi's Yominet appchain, where Sudoswap is the venue for buying Kami pets.

Shen's pitch, in his own words, is that DeFi has consumed most of the onchain story while crypto has matured into something more sterile. He frames Stomp as a reaction. The EVM is described as an incredibly rich programming environment that can support things beyond markets, and he wants something built for "the optimistic ones left," the ones who still care about onchain composability and the more esoteric corners of Solidity engineering, but packaged into something a non-technical friend can actually try.

The honest scope is part of the marketing. Shen explicitly notes that this is not, and is not trying to become, esports. He says he would be happy if the game spawns small side events at every Ethereum conference, with people running onchain battles and treating it as a cultural artifact rather than a winner-take-all competitive scene.

A Stance on Tokens

The post takes a direct shot at the play-to-earn frame that defined the previous gaming cycle. Shen writes that you cannot play-to-earn, win-to-earn, risk-to-earn, "shit-to-earn, eat-to-earn, etc" for a game, and that calling something a job and calling it a game are two different things. Games, in his framing, are labors of love and expression.

The argument is not that markets do not belong in games. The argument is the order. If a game's only mechanic is the money game, it collapses into another inflationary token chart. But if the base layer is interesting enough that players care about the characters, the progression, and the outcome, then onchain markets become a legitimate substrate to layer on top, including bonding curves, order books, and exotic perpetuals. The condition is that people care first, before money starts changing hands.

Stomp, at its current stage, does not lead with token speculation. There is no pre-launch token, no pre-sale gating play, and no airdrop farm. The game is up at stomp.gg and the studio is asking people to try it, not to mint anything.

How It Fits On MegaETH

MegaETH itself is the technical backbone making Stomp's design choices possible. The chain went to mainnet earlier in 2026 with a focus on ultra-low latency, sub-millisecond response feeling, and throughput targets in the 100,000 transactions per second range. That profile is what allows a fully onchain 1v1 turn-based game to feel responsive enough to compete for player attention against any traditional Web2 mobile or browser game.

The chain's gaming wave has been one of its more visible consumer pillars since launch. MegaETH stress-tested its mainnet with games specifically because their per-transaction patterns are the most punishing real-time load a network can take. Stomp sat alongside Crossy Fluffle and Smasher in those stress tests and is now one of the titles validating the original pitch in production conditions.

What Comes Next

The studio has already telegraphed that more monsters are on the way. Beyond the roster expansion, Shen has signalled that a full technical blog post explaining the Solidity-to-TypeScript transpiler, the storage tricks, and the commit-reveal architecture is incoming. The longer-term ambition is for Stomp to stand as an example of an application that is "full-fledged and robustly onchain" in the same way ENS or Uniswap are, not as a public good but as what the founder calls "a public attraction."

The closing line of the blog is the cleanest framing of the bet: nobody is early to these ideas, but nobody has done it yet. With the alpha exit live and the game open to anyone who wants to try it, Stomp is now the live test of whether a fully onchain monster battler can earn a place in the cultural memory of crypto without leaning on a token to do the work.