After the concepts of chain abstraction and account abstraction, Zypher Network further proposed the concept of server abstraction and, based on zk technology, launched the first server abstraction solution applied to the Web3 gaming field. Based on this solution, game developers can create and run games in a completely decentralized environment without relying on traditional centralized server architectures. The game world can also run on multiple distributed nodes and has the ability for autonomous dynamic sharding and efficient data synchronization.
The new server abstraction narrative may be the optimal solution for the operation of Web3 games, making game operation more efficient, secure, and trustworthy. It is also expected to become a key driver for a new round of growth in the GameFi sector.
The Web2.5 Moment of Blockchain Games
Blockchain games themselves are touted as Web3, retaining traditional gameplay while introducing token economic elements such as Crypto, NFTs, and P2E features, which assetize game content and give players ownership of assets. However, the vast majority of blockchain layers do not have the conditions to support the operation of game logic. Let's make an assumption: if a game generates one on-chain transaction per player per second (such as moving, skill release, etc.), and we assume there are 10,000 active players participating in the game at the same time, then the blockchain layer should reach at least 10,000 TPS to support these players to play smoothly; otherwise, the game will be extremely laggy, and gas fees will be exorbitantly high (one can look at the gas fee situation on various chains during the inscription period). Currently, there seems to be no chain that can meet the above requirements through practical testing.
Therefore, to ensure a high-quality gaming experience, especially for real-time online games, the game logic is usually run on off-chain servers (storage, computation, etc., occur off-chain), which provides an experience similar to that of Web2 games. However, continuous data synchronization between on-chain and off-chain is necessary to ensure that the state among players remains consistent.
For example, when I purchase a sword in the game, the off-chain database needs to synchronize this on-chain transaction data in real-time to increase the number of weapons in my inventory, allowing me to use it whenever needed. This process of synchronizing data between on-chain and off-chain is continuous and labor-intensive.
In fact, this Web2.5 approach needs to bear a series of issues brought about by centralized servers, including censorship, hacking attacks, and other risks leading to single points of failure in games, as well as scalability issues. Of course, the need for continuous synchronization of on-chain and off-chain data may also lead to problems such as data hijacking, data leakage, and cheating caused by malicious actions from game developers, especially when economic interests are involved, making it difficult to ensure that the executors do not act maliciously, as there is no mechanism to limit wrongdoing.
Another potential issue is that the token economy is on-chain, while game logic is off-chain, and the two are usually parallel. The logic of the game and player interactions are often very complex, involving a large number of real-time decisions, state changes, and randomness, which makes it difficult to encapsulate game logic entirely within smart contracts. For instance, items, character skills, and event triggers in games are usually dynamically changing and hard to fully represent through static code, so developers need to frequently adjust strategies to match the game.
The Development Dilemma of Blockchain Games
Thus, when on-chain computing power is limited, transaction costs are high, and real-time requirements are stringent, Web2.5 games often struggle to implement more complex game logic, leading to many Web3 games lacking in quality and being unable to achieve profitability through the game content itself. In this context, developers may gamble their income on token economies and NFT sales, while some resourceful teams rely on financing support. However, games relying solely on token appreciation and P2E incentives often struggle to maintain daily active users, as seen in typical projects like Axie Infinity and Star Atlas.
On the other hand, we see many Web3 development teams claiming to develop blockchain AAA games, which may not be realistic.
AAA games themselves have extremely long development cycles. Whether it is "Black Myth: Wukong," characterized by immersive gameplay and captivating cultural backgrounds (with global sales exceeding 18.1 million copies), or "Starfall," launched by Sony, which had a peak daily active user count of only around 700 on Steam less than half a month after its market release, both have undergone eight years of development. Given the massive investment and time commitment, expecting to gain returns from the crypto market is quite unrealistic. Especially for Web2 AAA development teams with mature business models, they may be even less willing to disrupt their business models in the Web3 space and take on unnecessary burdens.
Similarly, facing complex game logic and elements, existing infrastructure is unable to provide adequate support, which is one of the fundamental reasons.
Thus, whether in terms of technology, investment, timelines, or existing industry resources (including infrastructure), it is difficult to provide support, especially considering the rapidly changing trends in the crypto market.
We observe that the on-chain gaming sector, which has not significantly changed paradigms, struggles to overcome user attrition and has almost no new users, remaining in a low valley period.
Fundamentally changing the operational logic of existing games to more reasonably escape Web2.5 and transition to Web3 may be key to improving the development and growth issues faced by current blockchain games, and the server abstraction narrative proposed by Zypher Network may be the optimal solution.
Server Abstraction Narrative
First, let's discuss server abstraction.
Chain abstraction and account abstraction have previously been highly discussed narratives in the industry, both aiming to lower the barriers for users to utilize on-chain facilities by folding in cryptographic native designs. For example, account abstraction allows for custom account behaviors, enabling accounts to execute complex smart contract logic. It simplifies user experience and supports flexible designs for various authentication and transaction methods. For instance, based on account abstraction features, when I generate a wallet account, I can use familiar characteristics (like email or even fingerprints) instead of mnemonic phrases, or implement gas payment on behalf of users based on abstraction layers. Chain abstraction, on the other hand, separates applications from the underlying implementation of specific blockchains, allowing developers to deploy applications across different blockchains without worrying about the underlying network details, thus enhancing cross-chain interoperability and development flexibility. Based on chain abstraction facilities, developers can seamlessly integrate multiple chains, and users can achieve cross-chain transactions without awareness.
Essentially, both account abstraction and chain abstraction achieve different behavioral directions and functional expansions by establishing different execution layers or structures, with variations in the solutions for implementing chain abstraction and account abstraction across different projects.
Zypher Network extends the concepts of account abstraction and chain abstraction, further proposing the concept of server abstraction.
Server abstraction resembles a serverless state, aiming to establish a new distributed resource service layer in a decentralized manner, reducing or hiding the complexity of underlying server infrastructure, ensuring that users and developers can transparently and efficiently access the required services without directly managing or interacting with physical or cloud servers. Server abstraction can directly meet the computational and storage resource needs of decentralized applications (dApps) or blockchain projects without relying on centralized servers.
As the underlying engine in the blockchain gaming field, Zypher Network has taken the lead in applying the server abstraction narrative to the blockchain gaming sector.
Zypher Network's Server Abstraction Solution
Zypher Network itself is a set of Web3 game engine infrastructure based on zero-knowledge proof solutions. It not only provides developers with multifunctional tools based on zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), lowering the barriers for developers to use ZKP and other technologies to develop Web3 games, but also serves as a distributed game engine system after game development is completed, providing powerful and flexible infrastructure for decentralized game operation, meeting various technical needs and enhancing the gaming experience, while further embedding necessary functions as needed.
Zypher Network does not deploy game logic on centralized servers but directly writes game logic into on-chain circuits, while tasks like generating proofs based on ZKP occur off-chain, with the final verification of proofs returning to the chain.
The generation of proofs is driven by its off-chain distributed verification node network layer, where each node possesses the ability to generate zero-knowledge proofs and communicate, providing strong computational support for games, driven by a token economy. We see that both the on-chain and off-chain components work together to support game operation, fulfilling the role of a server, but both operate in a decentralized manner. Therefore, there are no actual specific server facilities in this system; we can understand it as abstracting the server while achieving better performance than traditional servers.
Operational Logic
- Off-chain Component
When the game runs, nodes in the Zypher Network engine aggregate the action logs generated by players' continuous gaming behaviors into ZK proofs. Within a certain period, these gaming actions (each being a transaction) are aggregated into a single ZKP proof, and multiple proofs are submitted to the chain in a single transaction. This method not only significantly reduces gas fees but also ensures a seamless gaming experience for players in some PvE games.
For some PvP scenarios, Zypher Network further launched the Z4 engine based on the aforementioned node network, providing a foundation for real-time multiplayer online gaming. The Z4 engine supports players to match and enter game rooms, which are stateless; the nodes themselves do not store data, greatly enhancing the engine's scalability, fault tolerance, security, and responsiveness, facilitating the distribution of computational tasks across multiple nodes without worrying about data synchronization issues, thus improving overall performance and efficiency.
In the Z4 engine's game rooms, players' operations are also packaged and sorted using ZKP, uploaded to the chain for verification, and executed. Notably, Z4 nodes support running game logic using virtual machines (wasm/evm/…), allowing smart contracts, economic models, and game logic to be built together in a composable manner. If higher efficiency is needed, developers can write game logic directly within the nodes without using virtual machines, and the gaming process will not involve transactions or gas fees, significantly reducing development costs for developers and gaming costs for players, while greatly enhancing the operational efficiency and load capacity of online games.
Once nodes complete the above series of tasks, they can obtain incentives from the network. Of course, nodes also need to stake some tokens to increase the cost of wrongdoing, as malicious actions will incur penalties.
- On-chain Component
Zypher Network's on-chain component has launched a modular Layer3 system (Zytron engine) dedicated to serving the gaming ecosystem, supporting developers to build their APP Chains in a modular manner. By providing a series of plug-and-play tool components, developers can construct autonomous worlds, small strategy games, or migrate AAA games to the chain at the lowest cost without a steep learning curve, while retaining production-level UE and offloading the complex computational processes corresponding to game logic to off-chain nodes. Based on Layer3, off-chain nodes can automatically scale according to load, further ensuring efficient game operation and a seamless user experience.
From the perspective of verifying off-chain proofs, on one hand, the Zytron engine itself is customized and modularly deployed in a Layer3 manner, achieving 0 gas design through a series of technical optimizations, while on-chain it possesses some precompiled contracts, providing extremely high verification efficiency compared to most chains. On the other hand, the Zytron engine is also integrated with EigenLayer, deploying an AVS computing layer on EigenLayer, which can achieve highly efficient and secure verification efficiency while ensuring decentralization. For different gaming solutions, customizable verification methods can be selected to better match specific gaming scenarios, ensuring more efficient overall game operation.
In addition, the Zytron engine integrates Celestia as the default data availability (DA) option, further reducing the data burden on the on-chain system.
In summary, all designs aim to ensure a more efficient and decentralized operation of the system or game.
It is worth mentioning that Zypher Network has currently launched the first Layer 3 mainnet designed specifically for game developers on Linea, marking a new milestone in the technical progress of the ecosystem.
Crossing from Web2.5 to Web3
The shortcomings of Web2.5 mainly manifest in security, trustworthiness, and efficiency. At the same time, its difficulty in realizing complex game logic leads to the low quality of on-chain games, causing developers' and players' attention to focus primarily on the economic ecosystem.
The advantages of the Zypher Network server abstraction solution are evident, as it can provide support for game operation in a parallel manner through a distributed node network without the need for constant synchronization of on-chain and off-chain data. This system also possesses a high degree of scalability that traditional centralized servers do not have, and there is no single point of risk, while the entire operational process is trustworthy.
On the other hand, within this system, due to its unique architectural design and modular integration with external systems, the chain does not bear excessive pressure from the computations and verification processes involved in game operation logic. Moreover, its unique architectural design supports localized programming and is compatible with various EVMs, meaning that economic models, smart contracts, and game logic are no longer parallel; they can achieve dynamic combinations.
With Zypher Network, the Web3 gaming field will no longer be limited to small and medium-sized games; large games with complex game content and logic, including AAA games, can also transition to Web3 and continuously receive high levels of support in operation. Blockchain games can win with high-quality game experiences, and developers can capture larger markets through the games themselves rather than solely relying on FOMO economic models and the value and appreciation of tokens.
In fact, if Web3 games can achieve gaming experiences equal to or even better than Web2 games, I believe that with the support of features such as P2E and asset ownership, Web3 games will possess higher attractiveness and influence, allowing them to reach broader markets and continuously welcome new growth points.
The server abstraction narrative is expected to become a key factor in maintaining the vitality of the GameFi sector and advancing to the next stage of development, and Zypher Network is becoming the initiator of the server abstraction narrative.