An Endeavor Towards Next-Generation Gaming Infrastructure for Autonomous World-Building, Featuring Zero Knowledge Game Engines.

Background

Around the world, there are approximately 2.6 billion gamers, predominantly operating on centralized servers. Throughout its history, the gaming industry has experienced numerous paradigm shifts, each propelled by groundbreaking technological innovations. Periodically, these catalysts dramatically reshape the landscape, paving the way to challenge “established norms” and redefine gaming as we know it.

By providing a ZKP-powered game engine optimized for building autonomous worlds, Zypher aims to empower developers to build fully on-chain games and publish them in a decentralized manner, thus redefining gamers' relationship with games. These AW (Autonomous World) zk-games, with guarantees of the UI/UE provided in today’s AAA games, are autonomous social contracts that offer unprecedented scalability, composability, programmability, and self-autonomy, supported by virtual machines, ZKP libraries, and on-chain information imperfection.

Is “Crypto-native Games” a FAD or Here to Stay?

A commonly observed parallel in on-chain gaming literature is the concept of an "Autonomous World," which aligns closely with this mental framework. Fully on-chain games, as manifestations of autonomous worlds, mean that under this approach, the blockchain is used as an alternative to a centralized game server, with all players indexing from and writing to a shared state on-chain.

Yet, do gamers care if the game’s reality exists “on-chain” in a crypto-native manner? They will probably notice some changes in the game loop first:

1. Mechanisms that bake “on-chain” elements lead to “hiccups” in the game loop when they need to pay for gas fees, sign for transactions, and wait for move logs to be “finalized” on-chain. If they are playing a fully on-chain game, every move is a transaction.
2. Economic incentives. Verifiable attestations and asset programmability grant gamers true, composable digital ownership which transcends their monetization strategies, enabling them to trade their on-chain experiences in 721 tokens (or other standards) on different NFT marketplaces.

Instead of a fully on-chain approach, most game designers will leverage an “On-chain Assets” (OCA) or “Optional Cosmetic Mints (OCM)” approach (thus prioritizing inflationary assets which likely leads to “death spirals” by design) to avoid the first issue while amplifying the second due to the lack of production-level infrastructure solutions for the first.

“Crypto-native” Approach from Developers’ Perspective

Paradigm shifts should not come from “cosmetic innovation” approaches by embedding an option to move a game’s economics system on-chain; they come from something designed differently from the bottom up. For game designers, the benefit of transcending into autonomous worlds goes beyond just putting economic systems on-chain.

• Token Economy: Blockchain gaming inherently incorporates a tokenized economy. This feature allows for the use of digital assets that can be traded across hundreds of exchanges without the need for fiat currency integration and the compliance complexities that come with traditional financial services. This token economy simplifies transactions and can potentially eliminate the economic disputes common in traditional gaming models.
• Reduced Server Costs: Games can be hosted on existing blockchain infrastructures, which are maintained by a distributed network of validators rather than a single entity. This model allows developers to focus primarily on the development costs, removing the burden of expensive and high-maintenance server infrastructures. The economic models supported by blockchain can also be used to outsource certain services to third parties, further reducing operational costs.
• Trustless Experience: Since all transactions and game mechanics are recorded on the blockchain, players can verify the fairness of the game, fostering a higher level of trust. This transparency assures players of the integrity of the game mechanics and the security of their in-game assets. Additionally, the decentralized nature of blockchain ensures that games are less likely to be shut down or disrupted, as there is no central point of failure.

https://lh7-us.googleusercontent.com/CfK15glY2L_znyi_uux2fLKFSYYSitF_plePWu0pwLmZ_243yPFKJ1AjrsUYWZQuVBNjWgYmgYr30J1u5ABuIVKuZPiAXLXY9S3l-0UaqCXY5JR5hBmi5ntDBqxjHpwAw37c1B0jl6AkIEAreTxql-g

Zypher AW Engine

Zero Knowledge Proofs (ZKPs) serve as a versatile tool, facilitating an extensive range of scalability and privacy enhancements across various applications. They offer solutions to some of blockchain’s inherent limitations to support gaming use cases: scalability and concurrency; provable fairness of off-chain moves; information asymmetry.

The zk-Engine includes the following components: