Full-chain on-chain games (FOCG) as financial markets: The ultimate form of Web3 games
The financial market is a game where players enhance their wealth through mutual trading.Author: Hill Tan（Adventure Layer AGLD）, Lewis Arnsten（Supersize）
I. Financial Markets as a Game
Financial markets are a game where players enhance their wealth through mutual trading. This model demonstrates unique advantages in addressing several core issues faced by traditional games. With proper design, Web3 games have the potential to solve these problems.
Power Imbalance Between Creators and Players: Game creators often have the freedom to change the rules at will, whereas in financial markets, the influence of creators is far less than that of players. In the past, despite the strong control exerted by hedge funds, banks, and governments over financial markets, it ultimately led to the emergence of Bitcoin and decentralized finance (DeFi). In these decentralized markets, once financial instruments are deployed, the control of creators is almost zero, which balances the power between players and creators.
Power Imbalance Among Amateur Players, Professional Players, and Bots: In traditional games, it is nearly impossible for amateur players to consistently defeat professional players or bots. However, this situation is different in financial markets. Although "retail investors" are at a disadvantage in terms of technology, information, and capital scale, they can outperform most fund managers through index funds, which are typically managed by professionals capable of using algorithmic trading.
In short, the appeal of financial markets as a game lies in the fact that the activities of players themselves shape the game environment, rather than being determined by the creators. This endows "markets as games" with the following unique characteristics:
Different Victory Conditions for Different Players: Depending on their trading goals and strategies, different players have different victory conditions. Players do not have to pursue a unified goal. Traders with varying capital scales, investment returns, and time horizons each have their own strategies to participate, play, and ultimately exit the game. This ensures that financial markets can maintain a long-term player base as a game.
Transparent Environment and Traceable History: The current status and historical records of each player are public, allowing players to develop strategies against each other. This transparency makes it difficult for any player to maintain an advantage over the long term, thus making the game fairer and enhancing the enjoyment of the game to some extent. The result is that this game environment helps to continuously generate excess returns.
Minimal Input from Creators into the Environment: The vast majority of information driving traders' decisions is generated by other traders, such as current asset prices, the shape and depth of the order book, etc. This allows players to coordinate and significantly alter the game environment. The most famous example is the confrontation between the Wallstreet Bets community and hedge funds over GameStop stock.
Therefore, financial markets are currently the only true use case in the Web3 space that has achieved product-market fit (PMF), as blockchain can provide a more transparent and traceable environment than most off-chain financial markets.
II. Designing Fully On-Chain Games Like Financial Markets (FOCG)
To create a game in the Web3 world that can achieve a similar product-market fit (PMF) as financial markets, we must focus on replicating the unique characteristics of "markets as games." This includes designing a transparent and traceable game environment generated by player activities, providing them with different victory conditions.
The "io" games in the Web2 world (such as agar.io, slither.io) align very well with this model. The simplicity and minimalist style of "io" games ensure that creators have almost no control over the game environment beyond setting up the game server. Players can easily create and modify their own versions of the game, similar to forking on-chain protocols. Additionally, the real-time multiplayer battle mode of the game allows human players to defeat professional players and bots through innovative strategies and coordination. Advantages in the game can be gained through various aspects, such as capital scale, decision-making ability, and efficient collaboration in resource acquisition.
Adventure Layer has been searching for a fully on-chain game type. After three years of attempts and consolidating theories around fully on-chain games, we are excited to have found Supersize, a new game studio that aligns closely with our unique approach to FOCG.
III. Introduction to Supersize
Supersize.gg, as the agar.io version of FOC (Fully On-Chain Control), provides players with an experience similar to participating in financial markets. Players enter the game using tokens, can join with any amount of tokens at any time, and can exit at any time, settling their scores in tokens.
In Supersize, larger players move slower than smaller players but can accelerate by consuming tokens to eat smaller players. The game state and logic of Supersize are entirely on-chain, and the game runs in real-time.
Game Design (Token Integration):
Supersize operates on a real-time and continuously updated map, scattered with free tokens that all players can consume. Each game is driven by a single token, with a wallet holding the game’s liquidity pool.
Players join the game by paying tokens and generate a small ball of the same size as the number of tokens paid. When new players enter, new tokens are added to the map in proportion to the number of tokens in the game’s liquidity pool.
When players exit, an exit tax is charged. Most of this tax is used to compensate for the newly added tokens in the game, provided in small token form for all players to consume; a small portion is retained in the liquidity pool, allowing each game to capture value over time. This mechanism ensures that successful Supersize games can continuously increase the number of tokens on the map as players join.
Supersize games attract speculative players to kickstart liquidity. When Supersize games are attractive enough, they will draw larger institutional players and bots, who will develop strategies to maximize returns. Thus, certain Supersize games will become "winners," attracting most liquidity through interesting patterns or superior incentive mechanisms.
Supersize VS Trading:
Supersize mimics the feeling of trading. Players can achieve 10x returns in a short time and can cash out at any time to lock in profits, thus realizing different victory conditions for different players. Therefore, as players continuously consume other players and expand their spheres, they experience the thrill of accumulating profits.
Supersize is very similar to futures trading: users only experience the derivative market of gains and losses. There is significant upside potential, but also high downside risk. There are no token exchange actions or pricing actions. Additionally, Supersize fully supports mechanisms such as prediction markets, loans, leverage, and insurance based on player activities, all of which can influence player behavior in the game. Professional users can profit by providing information and tools, offering players a competitive advantage, thereby achieving higher profits or trading volumes, similar to how professional traders use Bloomberg while ordinary users use Robinhood.
Due to Supersize's transparent environment and traceable history, its evolutionary path is similar to the memecoin market, where players can formulate strategies based on the on-chain behavior of other players.
Supersize Strategy Examples:
Risk-Free Path Selection: Bots can monitor on-chain status and calculate the ideal path to collect free tokens.
Counterattack Strategy: Human players can observe bots moving along fixed paths and coordinate actions to consume these bots for their tokens.
Decoy Strategy: Players can generate a decoy ball of size 100 and place several predator spheres of size 500, then position the predator spheres in the path of enemies chasing the decoy ball.
IV. Conclusion
Combining the discoveries and lessons learned from those who have achieved product-market fit (PMF) and those who have failed, we believe that FOCG (Fully On-Chain Games) is the natural next step in the evolution of on-chain financial primitives and financial markets. By providing a familiar and easy-to-learn gaming experience, combined with a fully on-chain environment, Supersize has the potential to become the next "killer app," inspiring hundreds of on-chain games and applications that follow the same set of principles: variable victory conditions, transparency, traceability, and user-generated environments. This approach also unlocks the potential to add complex strategies, third-party clients, mods, derivatives, and other value-added services and tools. The potential of FOCG ecosystems like Supersize is at least on par with DeFi, if not greater.
Adventure Layer's mission is to promote FOCG on a large scale based on this theory, and Supersize is the best example. We hope to see more FOCG implement the design principles mentioned in our theory, and we welcome all FOCG enthusiasts to work towards this direction together.
