Thoughts on on-chain gaming

This is a fundamental shift in blockchain scaling.Running a game completely on-chain on a monolithic blockchain is economically unfeasible and will remain so for the foreseeable future. That is why most of the blockchain games that have been released in the past few years are in a hybrid form, having only a few components of their stack on-chain wh... See more

Dope Wars, Briq, Loots, The Realms, The Ninth, and Influence, to name a few, belong to this category.In this article, we would like to explore the strengths and weaknesses of each macro-category.

Since the advent of Optimistic Rollups (ORUs) and Zk-Rollups (ZRUs), the paradigm has changed.Computation is run off-chain by high-end machines (the provers) while posting a fraud proof (on ORUs) or a validity proof (on ZRUs) on a settlement chain, which can prove the computation integrity, or in other words, that the computation has been executed ... See more

For example, Starknet's virtual machine, powered by Cairo, unleashes this true potentiality as their native programming language is not bounded by the EVM constraints.

Games like Axie Infinity, Crabada, and The Sandbox belong to this category.

The network nodes can verify the attached proofs several orders of magnitude faster and cheaper than verifying the computation itself, thus enabling complex computation at a pretty cheap cost, such as gaming dynamics.

Thanks to these proofs, it is possible to exponentially increase the computational complexity and throughput while maintaining the verification cost linear or even less.

Through off-chain scaling, users will have access to unlimited computation at a cheap cost. Thus, games' logic could be finally deployed on-chain as smart contracts. We will refer to this family of games as strongly on-chain games.

The gaming industry is slowly waking up to blockchain technology. It will dramatically change the gaming landscape to the benefit of gamers.

Blockchains charge a monetary fee to the users proportional to the computational burden the nodes must verify. Thus, on this monolithic stack, the computation cost is quite high. Developers have been forced to write their code around such constraints, not being able to express the true potential of on-chain applications.