After the concepts of chain abstraction and account abstraction, Zypher Network further proposed the concept of server abstraction, and based on zk technology, it was the first to launch a server abstraction solution for the Web3 gaming field. Based on this solution, game developers can create and run games in a fully decentralized environment without relying on the traditional centralized server architecture, and the game world can also run on multiple distributed nodes, with the ability to self-dynamically shard and efficiently synchronize data.
The brand-new server abstraction narrative may be the optimal solution for the operation mode of Web3 games, making the operation of games more efficient, secure, and trustworthy, and it is also expected to become the key to driving a new round of growth in the GameFi track.
The Web2.5 Moment of Blockchain Games
Blockchain games themselves are touted as Web3, retaining the gameplay of traditional games and introducing token economic elements such as Crypto, Non-Fungible Tokens, and P2E features, which make the game content asset-based and give players ownership of assets. But the vast majority of underlying blockchains do not have the conditions to support the operation of game logic. Let's make an assumption that each player in a certain game generates 1 on-chain transaction per second (such as status updates for movements, skill releases, etc.), and we assume that there are 10,000 active players participating in the game at the same time, then the underlying blockchain should at least reach 10,000 TPS to support these players to play the game smoothly, otherwise the game will be extremely stuttering and the Gas fees will be extremely high (you can see the Gas fee situation on various chains during the Rune period). Currently, the chains that have been proven to be able to meet the above requirements seem to be non-existent.
Therefore, in order to ensure a high-quality gaming experience, especially for some real-time online games, the game logic is usually running on off-chain servers (storage, computation, etc. all happen off-chain), which will bring a similar experience to Web2 games. But the game needs to constantly synchronize data between on-chain and off-chain to ensure that the player states are consistent.
For example, when I buy 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 backpack, and I can take it out and use it whenever I need it. This process of synchronizing data between on-chain and off-chain is continuous and the workload is huge.
In fact, this Web2.5 approach needs to bear a series of problems brought by centralized servers, including censorship, hacker attacks and other single-point risks of the game, as well as scalability issues. Of course, due to the need for continuous synchronization of on-chain and off-chain data, it may also lead to problems such as data hijacking, data leakage and cheating caused by the malicious behavior of game developers, especially when it involves economic interests, it is difficult to ensure that the executor will not act maliciously, after all, there is no mechanism to restrict malicious behavior.
Another potential problem is that the token economy is on-chain, while the game logic is off-chain, and the two are usually parallel. The game logic and player interaction are usually very complex, involving a large number of real-time decisions, state changes and randomness, which also makes it difficult to completely encapsulate the game logic in smart contracts. For example, we say that the props, character skills, event triggers, etc. in the game are usually dynamically changing, and it is difficult to fully represent them through static code, so developers need to constantly adjust the strategies to match the game.
The Development Dilemma of Blockchain Games
So when the on-chain computing power is limited, the transaction cost is high, and the real-time requirement is high, Web2.5 games usually find it difficult to implement more complex game logic, which also leads to many Web3 games being lacking in quality and unable to achieve profitability through the game content itself. In this context, developers will bet their income on token economics and Non-Fungible Token sales, and some well-resourced teams rely on financing to support themselves, while the games themselves are usually difficult to maintain daily active users solely through token appreciation and P2E incentives, such as typical projects like Axie Infinity and Star Atlas.
On the other hand, we see that many Web3 development teams claim to be developing blockchain AAA games, which may not be realistic.
The development cycle of AAA games is extremely long, whether it is "Black Myth: Wukong" - a AAA masterpiece characterized by immersive gaming experience and captivating cultural background (the global total sales have already exceeded 18.1 million copies), or "Horizon Forbidden West" - a game launched by Sony, which only had a peak daily active of around 700 on Steam in less than half a month, both have experienced an eight-year development cycle. The huge investment and time input make it a fantasy to expect a return from the crypto market. Especially for mature commercial model Web2 AAA development teams, they may be even more unwilling to come to the Web3 field to disrupt their own business model and add unnecessary burdens.
Similarly, faced with complex game logic and elements, the existing infrastructure is difficult to provide good support, which is also one of the most fundamental reasons.
So whether it's technology, investment, timeline, or existing industry resources (including infrastructure, etc.), it is difficult to provide support for them, not to mention the crypto market direction changes extremely fast.
We can see that the on-chain game field, which has not undergone a major paradigm shift, is difficult to overcome the predicament of user loss and almost no new users, and is in a continuous downturn.
Fundamentally changing the operating logic of existing games and more reasonably breaking away from Web2.5 and crossing over to Web3 may be the key to improving the development and growth problems 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 are narratives that have been highly voiced in the industry before, and they both aim to lower the threshold for users to use on-chain facilities by folding crypto-native designs. For example, account abstraction allows customized account behavior, making accounts able to execute complex smart contract logic. It simplifies the user experience and supports flexible design of various identity authentication and transaction methods, such as using familiar features (email or even fingerprints) instead of seed phrases to generate wallet accounts, or implementing gas fee payment based on the abstraction layer.
Chain abstraction, on the other hand, is to separate the application program from the underlying implementation of a specific blockchain, allowing developers to deploy applications on different blockchains without having to care about the details of the underlying network, thereby improving cross-chain interoperability and development flexibility. Based on the chain abstraction facility, developers can integrate multiple chains seamlessly, and users can also achieve cross-chain transactions transparently.
Essentially, both account abstraction and chain abstraction are realized by establishing different execution layers or structures to achieve different behavior orientations and functional extensions, and the implementation schemes of different projects for chain abstraction and account abstraction have certain differences.
Zypher Network has extended the concepts of account abstraction and chain abstraction, and further proposed the concept of server abstraction.
Server abstraction is more like a serverless state, that is, it aims to establish a new distributed resource service layer in a decentralized way, reducing or hiding the complexity of the underlying server infrastructure, ensuring that users and developers can transparently and efficiently access the required services without directly managing and contacting physical and cloud servers. Server abstraction can directly meet the computing and storage resource needs of decentralized applications (dApps) or blockchain projects, while not relying on centralized servers.
As the underlying engine in the blockchain game field, Zypher Network has taken the lead in applying the server abstraction narrative to the blockchain game field.
Zypher Network's Server Abstraction Solution
The Zypher Network itself is a Web3 game engine infrastructure based on a zero-knowledge proof scheme. It not only provides developers with multi-functional tools based on zero-knowledge proof (ZKP), reducing the threshold for developers to use ZKP and other technologies to develop Web3 games, but also as a distributed game engine system after the game is developed, Zypher Network provides a powerful and flexible infrastructure for the decentralized operation of the game, meeting various technical requirements and enhancing the game experience, and further embedding necessary functions as needed.
The Zypher Network itself does not deploy the game logic on a centralized server, but directly writes the game logic into the on-chain circuits, but the work of generating proofs based on ZKP is done off-chain, and the final verification of the proof is returned to the chain.
The generation of the proof is driven by its off-chain distributed verification node network layer, in which each node has the ability to generate zero-knowledge proofs and communicate, and can provide strong computing support for the game, and this network is driven by a token economy. We can see that the on-chain part and the off-chain part work together to provide support for the operation of the game, and jointly realize the function of the server, but both parts are running in a decentralized manner. So in this system there is no actual server facility, we can understand it as abstracting the server, but it can achieve better results than the traditional server.
Running Logic
l Off-chain part
When the game is running, the nodes in the Zypher Network engine will aggregate the action logs generated by the player's continuous game behavior into ZK proofs, and within a certain period of time these game actions (each of which is a transaction) are aggregated into a ZKP proof, and multiple proofs are submitted to the chain in the form of a single transaction, which not only greatly reduces the Gas fee, but also for the deployment of some PvE games, can ensure a delay-free gaming experience for players.
For some PvP scenarios, Zypher Network has further launched the Z4 engine based on the above node network, which can provide a basic infrastructure for real-time online multiplayer. The Z4 engine supports players to enter the game room through matching, and the room itself is a stateless room, and the nodes do not store data, which greatly improves the scalability, fault tolerance, security, and responsiveness of the engine, and facilitates the distribution of computing tasks among multiple nodes without worrying about data synchronization issues, thereby improving overall performance and efficiency.
In the game rooms of the Z4 engine, the player's operations will also be packaged and ordered in the form of ZKP and uploaded to the chain for verification and execution of the results. It is worth mentioning that the Z4 nodes support the use of virtual machines (wasm/evm/...) to run game logic, so that smart contracts, economic models and game logic can be built in a composable way. And if higher efficiency is required, developers can write game logic directly in the nodes without using virtual machines, and the game process will not involve transactions and Gas fees, greatly reducing the development costs of developers and the game costs of players, and greatly improving the running efficiency and load capacity of online games.
After the nodes complete the above series of work, they will be able to receive incentives from the network, of course, the nodes also need to pledge some tokens to increase the cost of malicious behavior, and malicious behavior will result in confiscation.
l On-chain part
The on-chain part of the Zypher Network has launched a modular Layer3 system (Zytron engine) dedicated to the game ecosystem, supporting developers to build their own APP Chain in a modular way, through the provision of plug-and-play series of tool components, developers can build autonomous worlds, small strategy games, or migrate AAA games to the chain at the lowest cost and without a steep learning curve, while retaining production-grade UE, and the complex computational processes corresponding to the game logic can be offloaded to the off-chain nodes. Based on Layer3, the off-chain nodes can also automatically scale according to the load, further ensuring the efficient operation of the game and the seamless experience of the users.
In terms of the verification of the off-chain proof, on the one hand, the Zytron engine itself is customized and modularized deployed in the form of Layer3, and through a series of technical optimizations, it can achieve a 0 Gas design, and at the same time, it has some pre-compiled contracts on the chain, which have extremely high verification efficiency compared to the vast majority of chains. On the other hand, the Zytron engine is also integrated with EigenLayer, and has deployed the AVS computing layer on EigenLayer, which can also achieve highly efficient and secure verification efficiency, and ensure decentralization. For different game solutions, the verification method that best matches the specific game scenario can be customized to ensure the overall higher efficiency of the game operation.
In addition, the Zytron engine also integrates Celestia as the default data availability (DA) option, further reducing the burden on the on-chain system in terms of data.
In short, all the designs are to ensure the more efficient and decentralized operation of the system or game.
It is worth mentioning that Zypher Network has recently launched the first Layer 3 mainnet designed specifically for game developers on Linea, which heralds a new milestone in the technological progress of the ecosystem.
Crossing from Web2.5 to Web3
The shortcomings of Web2.5 are mainly reflected in the aspects of security, credibility and efficiency, and at the same time, due to the difficulty in realizing complex game logic, it leads to the low quality of on-chain games, making the attention of developers and players mainly focused on the economic ecology.
The advantages of Zypher Network's server abstraction solution are very obvious, that is, through the distributed node network, it can provide support for the operation of the game in a parallelized manner, and without the need for real-time synchronization of data between on-chain and off-chain. This system also has a much higher scalability than traditional centralized servers, and there is no single point of failure, and the entire operation process is trustworthy.
On the other hand, in this system, due to the unique architectural design and modular integration with external systems, the chain will not bear excessive pressure due to the computational and verification processes involved in the game logic. At the same time, its unique architectural design supports localized programming and is compatible with various EVMs, and the economic model, smart contracts and game logic are no longer parallel, they can be dynamically combined.
With Zypher Network, the Web3 game field will no longer be limited to some small and medium-sized games, some large games with complex game content and game logic, and AAA games can also be Web3-ized, and they can continue to receive high-matching support in operation. Blockchain games can also win with high-quality game quality, and developers can also gain a larger market through the game itself, rather than just the FOMO economic model and the value and appreciation of tokens.
In fact, if Web3 games can achieve the same or even better gaming experience as Web2 games, I think with the addition of features like P2E and asset ownership, Web3 games will have greater appeal and influence, and can enter a broader market and continue to see new growth points.
The server abstraction narrative is expected to become the key to keeping the GameFi track alive and moving to the next stage, and is expected to become the mainstream architecture for future Web3 applications, and Zypher Network is also becoming the initiator of the server abstraction narrative.
