Zypher Research: Server Abstract Narrative, the Next Narrative Hotspot in the GameFi Sector?

Following the concepts of chain abstraction and account abstraction, Zypher Network further proposes the concept of server abstraction and has launched a server abstraction solution applied to the Web3 gaming field based on zk technology. 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 and has 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. Let’s make an assumption: if a game generates one on-chain transaction per player per second (such as state updates for movement, skill releases, etc.), and we assume there are 10,000 active players participating in the game at the same time, then 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 the 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). This brings about an experience similar to that of Web2 games, which is very smooth. 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 I need it. This process of on-chain and off-chain data synchronization is ongoing and involves a massive workload.

In fact, this Web2.5 approach needs to bear a series of issues brought about by centralized servers, including censorship, hacking attacks leading to single-point risks in games, 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 leakage, 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 is on-chain, while the 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 example, items, character skills, and event triggers in the game are usually dynamically changing and difficult 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. This has led to many Web3 games lacking in quality and struggling to achieve profitability through the game content itself. In this context, developers often gamble their income on token economies and NFT sales, while some resourceful teams rely on financing to sustain themselves. However, games themselves, relying solely on token appreciation and P2E incentives, often find it difficult 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"—a AAA masterpiece characterized by immersive gameplay and captivating cultural backgrounds (with global sales exceeding 18.1 million copies)—or "Starfall: Special Attack," which was launched by Sony and had a peak daily active user count of only around 700 on Steam within half a month of 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 indeed wishful thinking. 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.

Faced with complex game logic and elements, existing infrastructure is also fundamentally unable to provide good support.

Therefore, whether in terms of technology, investment, timelines, or existing industry resources (including infrastructure), it is difficult to provide support, not to mention that the trends in the crypto market change rapidly.

We observe that the on-chain gaming field, which has not seen significant paradigm shifts, struggles to overcome the challenges of user attrition and nearly zero 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 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 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 instance, 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 example, based on account abstraction features, when I generate a wallet account, I can replace the mnemonic phrase with familiar characteristics (like an email or even a fingerprint), or implement Gas payment through the abstraction layer, etc. 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, thereby 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. Different projects have varying approaches to 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 is the first to apply the server abstraction narrative in the blockchain gaming domain.

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 barrier for developers to use ZKP and other technologies to develop Web3 games, but also serves as a distributed game engine system for decentralized game operation after the game is developed, providing powerful and flexible infrastructure to meet various technical needs and enhance the gaming experience, while further embedding necessary functions as needed.

Zypher Network does not deploy game logic on centralized servers; instead, it 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, driven by token economics. We see that both the on-chain and off-chain parts work together to support the operation of the game, collectively fulfilling the role of a server, but both parts 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 Part

When the game is running, nodes in the Zypher Network engine aggregate the action logs generated by players' continuous gameplay 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 that players experience no delays in gameplay for 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 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 game rooms of the Z4 engine, players' actions are also packaged and sorted in ZKP format, uploaded to the chain for verification, and executed for results. Notably, Z4 nodes support running game logic using virtual machines (wasm/evm/…), allowing smart contracts, economic models, and game logic to be constructed in a composable manner. If higher efficiency is required, developers can write game logic directly in the nodes without using a virtual machine, and the game 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 can receive incentives from the network. Of course, nodes also need to stake some tokens to increase the cost of malicious actions, as wrongdoing will incur penalties.

• On-chain Part

Zypher Network's on-chain part 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 the lowest cost and 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 operation of the game and 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 having some precompiled contracts on-chain, which provides 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 can also achieve highly efficient and secure verification efficiency while ensuring decentralization. For different game solutions, customizable verification methods that better match specific game scenarios can be selected to ensure more efficient overall operation of the game.

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 flaws of Web2.5 mainly manifest in security, trustworthiness, and efficiency, and its difficulty in implementing 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 Zypher Network's server abstraction solution are quite evident, as it can provide support for game operations 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, while there is no single point of risk, and the entire operation 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 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 content and game 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 provide 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 greater attractiveness and influence, and can reach broader markets, continuously welcoming new growth points.

The server abstraction narrative is expected to be key to maintaining the vitality of the GameFi sector and advancing to the next stage of development, and it is likely to become the mainstream architecture for future Web3 applications, with Zypher Network emerging as the initiator of the server abstraction narrative.