Fully on-chain - How does it work?

The premise of on-chain gaming

Envision a game in which the entire technical infrastructure is built on top of the blockchain. This means that every single component of the game, including all objects, interactions, and changes to the game's state, are recorded and executed on the blockchain. Furthermore, the fundamental rules governing the game's digital physics and gameplay are contained within a smart contract.

This level of blockchain-based gaming not only makes the game entirely decentralized, but it also gives each individual player full autonomy. The game becomes the property of the active player community, and anyone can build on it or fork it to create entirely new gaming experiences while adhering to the defined rules. The player community determines the dominant fork, allowing the game to continue to evolve over time.

Overcoming on-chain challenges

Being overly excited, we should not forget to get into the current limitations. On-chain games are hard to build, and require the best architecture and infrastructure that crypto as an industry can produce. Even right now, so early, we are seeing the need for zkp hardware acceleration, due to the need for hidden information in some on-chain game designs. Struggles include limited scalability, high gas fees, and hiding on-chain information and security concerns.

For limited scalability, we are leveraging zero-knowledge proofs to perform transactions off-chain, as well as reducing the amount of data that needs to be stored on the blockchain. With high gas fees, the hybrid approach that combines optimistic rollups and zk-rollups is the answer - by implementing this approach, we are able to achieve high throughput while maintaining a lower gas fee. Finally, for hiding on-chain information as well as security concerns when building on-chain, we are once again utilizing zero-knowledge proofs to ensure the integrity of transactions and also implementing additional security measures such as multi-signature wallets and timelocks.