After the concepts of chain abstraction and account abstraction, Zypher Network further proposed the concept of server abstraction and, based on zk technology, launched a server abstraction solution applied to the Web3 gaming field. With 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, with the ability for autonomous dynamic sharding and efficient data synchronization.
The new narrative of server abstraction may be the optimal solution for the operation of Web3 games, making gameplay 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. For instance, let's assume that each player in a game generates one on-chain transaction 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. The blockchain layer would need to reach at least 10,000 TPS to support these players playing smoothly; otherwise, the game would be extremely laggy, and gas fees would 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 these 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 (where 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 access it whenever needed. This process of synchronizing data between on-chain and off-chain is ongoing and involves a significant workload.
In fact, this Web2.5 approach must bear a series of issues brought about by centralized servers, including risks of single points of failure due to censorship, hacking attacks, and 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 leaks, and cheating due to malicious actions by 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 exists on-chain while game logic operates 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 dynamic and difficult to fully represent through static code, so developers often need to 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 bet their income on token economies and NFT sales, while some resourceful teams rely on financing support. However, games themselves, 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 have extremely long development cycles. Whether it is "Black Myth: Wukong," which features an immersive gaming experience and captivating cultural background (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 within half a month of market release, both have undergone eight years of development. The massive investment and time commitment make it a pipe dream to expect returns from the crypto market. Especially for Web2 AAA development teams with mature business models, they may be even less willing to disrupt their business models by entering the Web3 space and adding unnecessary burdens.
Similarly, facing complex game logic and elements, existing infrastructure struggles to provide adequate support, which is one of the fundamental reasons.
Therefore, whether in terms of technology, investment, timelines, or existing industry resources (including infrastructure), it is challenging to provide support, especially given the rapid changes in the crypto market.
We see that the on-chain gaming field, which has not seen significant paradigm shifts, struggles to overcome the loss of active users and the near absence of new users, remaining in a prolonged downturn.
Fundamentally changing the operational logic of existing games to more reasonably break free from 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 talk about server abstraction.
Chain abstraction and account abstraction have previously been highly discussed narratives in the industry, both aimed at lowering the threshold for users to utilize on-chain facilities by folding in cryptographic native designs. For example, account abstraction allows for customizable account behaviors, enabling accounts to execute complex smart contract logic. It simplifies the 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 replace the mnemonic with familiar features (like an email or even a fingerprint), or implement gas payment based on the abstraction layer. 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, and different projects have varying solutions for implementing chain abstraction and account abstraction.
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 needs of decentralized applications (dApps) or blockchain projects for computing and storage resources 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 blockchain games.
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 threshold for developers to use ZKP and other technologies to develop Web3 games, but also, once the game development is complete, Zypher Network serves as a distributed game engine system, providing powerful and flexible infrastructure for the decentralized operation of games, 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 writes game logic directly into on-chain circuits, while tasks such as 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 has the capability to generate zero-knowledge proofs and communicate, providing strong computational support for the game. This network is driven by token economics. We see that both the on-chain and off-chain components jointly support the operation of the game, fulfilling the role of a server, but both parts operate in a decentralized manner. Therefore, there are no actual server facilities in this system; we can understand it as abstracting the server while achieving better results 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 game behaviors into ZK proofs. Within a certain period, these game 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 approach not only significantly reduces gas fees but also ensures a delay-free gaming experience for some PvE game deployments.
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 enter game rooms through matching, where the room itself is stateless, and nodes 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, thereby improving overall performance and efficiency.
In the Z4 engine's game room, players' actions will also be packaged and sorted using ZKP, uploaded to the chain for verification, and executed. Notably, Z4 nodes support the use of virtual machines (wasm/evm/…) to run game logic, allowing smart contracts, economic models, and game logic to be constructed in a composable manner. Moreover, if higher efficiency is required, developers can write game logic directly within the nodes without using a virtual machine, 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 aforementioned series of tasks, they will be able to receive 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 in building their own APP Chains in a modular manner. By providing a series of plug-and-play tool components, developers can build autonomous worlds, small strategy games, or migrate AAA games to the chain at minimal cost and without a steep learning curve, while retaining production-grade 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 operation of games and seamless user experiences.
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 a 0 gas design through a series of technical optimizations, while on-chain it has some precompiled contracts, which provide extremely high verification efficiency compared to most chains. On the other hand, the Zytron engine is also integrated with EigenLayer, deploying the AVS computation layer on EigenLayer, which also achieves highly efficient and secure verification efficiency while ensuring decentralization. For different gaming solutions, customizable verification methods that better match specific gaming scenarios can be selected to ensure more efficient overall operation of the game.
Additionally, 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 ecological technological process.
Transitioning from Web2.5 to Web3
The shortcomings of Web2.5 mainly manifest in security, trustworthiness, and efficiency, while its difficulty in implementing complex game logic leads to low quality in on-chain games, causing developers' and players' attention to focus primarily on the economic ecosystem.
The advantages of Zypher Network's server abstraction solution are quite evident, as it can provide support for game operations in a parallelized manner through a distributed node network, without the need for continuous synchronization of on-chain and off-chain data. This system also possesses a high degree of scalability that traditional centralized servers do not have, while eliminating single-point risks, and 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 computational and verification processes involved in the game's operational logic. Additionally, 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 receive high levels of support in operation. Blockchain games can win with high-quality gameplay, 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 on par with or even superior to Web2 games, I believe that with the support of P2E and asset ownership features, Web3 games will possess greater attractiveness and influence, paving the way for broader markets and continuously welcoming new growth points.
The server abstraction narrative is expected to become key to maintaining the vitality of the GameFi sector and advancing to the next stage of development, and it is poised to become the mainstream architecture for future Web3 applications, with Zypher Network emerging as the initiator of the server abstraction narrative.