Fully On-Chain Games with zkSpin
Why fully-on-chain games?
On-chain games are trustworthy: One of our clients offers a substantial tournament prize every week to incentivize player engagement. However, players often question the fairness of these prizes, wondering if the company itself takes the prize money. The company finds it impossible to prove its integrity unless it goes fully on-chain. The blockchain brings transparency and alleviates players’ concerns regarding asset safety, data privacy, fairness, and game world stability.
Interoperable: Interoperability aligns perfectly with the spirit of open-source software and game modding. For the first time in history, we have a platform where all live systems are open for the community to use and modify.
Persistent: A player’s character on-chain can potentially outlive the player themselves, opening doors to genuinely novel game designs. For example, one might develop a game around the concept of “digital immortality” using AI agent technologies.
zkSpin’s Mission
zkSpin was founded on the observation that the blockchain is currently too slow for fully-on-chain games, with a mission to make the blockchain faster. Speed is the currency of computing. The blockchain currently provides a speed budget that is too tight and expensive (think gas fees!) for developers to create engaging content. This is one reason for fully-on-chain games to be associated with bad design these days.
zkSpin’s first innovation — the ephemeral rollup (ER) — effectively accelerates blockchain performance. ER operates on players’ own machines in a peer-to-peer (P2P) fashion, with results verified and settled on the parent chain. ER features minimal latency, zero gas fees, and imposes a minimal load on the parent chain. You can find a more detailed description, along with a demo, here. The first version of our SDK has been released at www.zkspin.xyz
Summary notes
“Fully-on-chain” can be a misleading term. For example, an L2 network is considered on-chain within its own context but off-chain relative to L1. What truly matters is whether the computation benefits from decentralized trust. You can find more details here.
Gaming is critical for platform performance improvement. If gaming had not driven demand for Nvidia’s GPUs over the past 20 years, we wouldn’t have GPUs fast enough to power today’s AI models. We expect gaming to continue demanding higher performance from blockchains, and it’s fascinating to consider what kinds of applications might eventually be unlocked as a result.
Market sentiment can be misleading. All markets have their cycles of highs and lows. There was a time when the internet was slow and costly, and when mobile games were dismissed by PC gamers. AI also experienced decades of stagnation before surprising the world with breakthroughs like ChatGPT. On-chain games have the potential to bring similar surprises.
Please don’t hesitate to reach out to dev@zkspin.xyz to find out more
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