Evolution of blockchain technology - an overview.
Bitcoin, blockchain and cryptocurrencies are almost becoming a household name. Since lately, significant progress has been made in the application of blockchain technology to sectors beyond the financial system. With the invention of bitcoin in 2009, several other cryptocurrencies have been introduced. The trading volume of cryptocurrencies continue to rise by the day. Blockchain technology is now providing solutions in Medicine, education, Insurance, Government, and many other sectors. The potential for further breakthrough in blockchain technology is limitless; the future is bright!
while undeniable progress has been reccorded in blockchain development, some recurring challenges need to be overcome. One big problem with blockchain technology is lack of mass adoption. When compared with other technologies, the application blockchain technology is still very limited and the technology is yet to get a firm footing in several major sectors. One such sector is the Gaming industry. There have been very few gaming frameworks built on the blockchain. This article will consider a unique blockchain-based gaming ecosystem that will transform how game developers and players work. But before that, consider some of the challenges facing the gaming industry.
Challenges facing the Gaming Industry
The gaming industry is really a huge one with equally enormous challenges. According to reliable sources, the global gaming industry is worth billions of dollars. The growth is in double figures and there is no stopping it. However, there are big time challenges that must be addressed to consolidate on the progress already made in the gaming industry. Consider the following:
1. Centralized: Game developers rely on huge companies that provide the development and deployment, and marketing platforms for their games. Because of having this central authority control their assets, game developers battle with unfair revenue sharing models. At the end of the day, the game developer goes home with less money while the controlling authority takes a large bite of the funds generated. Also, hosting their assets on a centralized server and infrastructure results in problems defining true assets ownership. Most times, the company providing the infrastructure and resource claims or holds bigger rights over the asset than the game developer. Finally, game developers could be defrauded by dishonest companies or worst yet, they could loose their asset to hacking.
These are some challenges that can be overcome with the decentralized nature of blockchain technology.
2. Dividend distribution: today's online gaming has problems not just unfair revenue sharing but also the medium for paying developers. Addition to centralized authorities making huge pay-cuts from developers funds, they also send te payments through traditional payment gateways like Visa. The payment gateway will charge a fee for payment processing further reducing the game developer's revenue. Also payments could be delayed in-between the platform sending funds to the processor and the processor paying the game developer. Blockchain technology can provide a secure direct payment to game developers with little or no processing fees.
3. Development time and funding: Game development is undoubtedly an expensive project to undertake. To pay companies that provide development infrastructure - like servers and other development tools- require substantial capital investment. Hence, upcoming game developers and firms find it difficult to break into the system and succeed. Additionally, being able to secure the needed funds is one thing; completing game development in less time is another. Currently it takes much time to build a game from concept, coding and design to testing, deployment and marketing. This is because development tools are not available in one platform and needs to be integrated at various stages of the project. Blockchain-based game development will provide a less expensive platform for game development and greatly increase game release time by hosting all the tools in one place.
Other challenges unique to gaming industry includes lack of transparency, government or corporate intervention and lack of security of gaming assets. These challenges are begging for solutions which blockchain technology can provide.
There are still very few blockchain solutions that can safely overcome the above challenges and streamline game development. However, there is one rare platform that has been working consistently to solve the problems facing the gaming industry using blockchain technology. This brought together experienced game and blockchain developers to find and merge the best of these two worlds. The project is called Xaya. What exactly is Xaya and how does it work?
Introducing the blockchain solution - Xaya
Xaya is a fully decentralized gaming universe built on the blockchain. Xaya creates a blockchain powered ecosystem where game developers can execute their game projects using integrated tools and game development methodologies in a distributed and democratic manner. On this platform, developers can build, test, and release their games to a virtual world of players and traders with assets that can transform to real value in the real world. Xaya will reduce the time and huge costs it takes to develop games by using blockchain technology to eliminate the need for centralized servers and other expensive infrastructure. Not only developers will gain from the system, game players will also take advantage of the unique marketplace on the platform.
Xaya will allow game players to fully own gaming assets and creates a fair and transparent platform for asset transfer and ownership. The assets marketplace created by Xaya will ensure vigorous trading and conversion of virtual assets to tangible valuables powered by the Xaya cryptocurrency.
How Xaya Overcomes known Problems in the gaming industry
How the gaming industry continues to grow in size and scope, known problems persist. Xaya has developed workable features and design fundamentals that will nearly completely eliminate gaming and game development challenges. For the sake of easier comprehension, this article will isolate the challenges faced by gamers and game developers as well as the Xaya solution for each category.
1. Costly development tools and time: The centralized nature of game development makes it quite an expensive undertaking. Currently, game developers have to rent server space for their projects. They also worry about recurring expenses such as subscriptions for online game development tools and other infrastructure. These costs may run into thousands of dollars a month. Additionally, the time it takes to set up servers and related platform tools increases the game release time. These challenges prevent developers from maximizing resources and time.
The Xaya Solution: Xaya will provide a decentralized game development platform with all the tool-set needed to start and complete any game development project. Xaya will utilize blockchain technology to democratize game development giving developers a springboard to launch their gaming projects. With blockchain technology, the need for renting cloud severs will be eliminated thereby significantly reducing the cost of running any game development project. Also, will greatly reduce the long period of time it takes to complete a game project by hosting all the tools and infrastructure needed for the job in one place - the blockchain.
2. Scalability: This has been a big issue with all cryptocurrencies. There is a limited amount of transactions any cryptocurrency can handle. Bitcoin can process between 3-7 transactions per second. The traditional financial systems that blockchain technology is aiming to replace are currently much faster. For example, Visa handles up to 24,000 transactions per second. Game development is much more resource intensive. To support multiplayer game development and massive game inventories will require a system that is both fast and expansive or scalable. Currently, blockchain technology is too slow or not scalable for this purpose.
The Xaya Solution: Xaya developed an innovative concept to tackle the issue of scalability. It is called game channels. Game channels are an extension of bitcoin payment channels that can be applied to a gaming virtual universe where game moves can be scaled off the blockchain. This technique causes Xaya to scale and still facilitates real-time gaming on the blockchain. With this proven concept, scalability could be solved on the Xaya game development platform. There is more though. Xaya employs a technique called Ephemeral timestamps to settle disputes. Transactions are made on-chain to settle disputes between gamers. The fraudulent or defaulting gamer is made to pay for these transactions. To achieve this, tweaked some techniques:
By mixing the time-stamping property of a blockchain, Merkle-ized hash commitments, amortised mining incentives, and fraud proofs in a clever way, we’ve been able to develop a new protocol that ensures that the occurring transaction fees can never be a loss for any honest participant.
3. Secure Affordable payment: Currently, online game developers are paid using traditional payment gateways. Everything is wrong with this method including high processing fees and delayed payments. Also, a peer-to-peer payment solution that ensures a direct payment from users to developers is currently not available. This presents a major issue as developers struggle to organize their funds efficiently.
The Xaya Solution: Because Xaya will be built on the blockchain, this presents the best, efficient, direct and most secure payment solution to developers. There will be no need for any middle man to handle payment process. All of this is done peer-to-peer with the highest financial security that only blockchain technology can provide.
The addition to the above mentioned benefit to developers, Xaya can also assist developers launch their own virtual coin and exchange it for the native coin used on the platform. Xaya will help developers launch their own gamer loyaty programs where users can be rewarded for playing games developed by a particular programmer. The benefits of Xaya to developers is simply enormous.
1. Provably fair gameplay: In most online casinos, game operators some times cheat on the players by making them bet on games that are not real. At other times, players are given misleading verification techniques that projects a non-existent game as real. This makes gamers loose money.
The Xaya Solution: Xaya will provide a completely verifiable algorithm which can be analyzed and verified for fairness on the part of the developer. Because blockchain technology is largely transparent, Xaya will ensure genuineness and earn player's confidence by providing a Provably fair gameplay. Game players will be assured of the worth of any in-game assets associated with each game and that they have a level playing ground for all the games. Xaya will hold transparency and fairness as virtues that must be protected to build and maintain trust on the platform.
2. Reliability and stability: Current developer platforms carry lots of uncertainty because games are developed and stored on the cloud. Server down time, maintenance and threats of hacking can all contribute to gaming assets unavailability and unreliability. This puts gamer funds at risk. Simply put, today's centralized gaming apparatus is largely insecure.
The Xaya Solution: Xaya will be built on the blockchain which is very stable and runs 24/7 with no downtime. Blockchain's decentralized technology ensures that gaming assets are available all the time and is not affected by server maintenance or infrastructure upgrades. With the highest level of security available to blockchain technology, gamers will have the confidence that their funds and assets are never in danger of being hacked or not accessible. In addition to fairness of Xaya, its tough blockchain security will definitely attract more players to the platform.
Previous Work - Huntercoin
The Xaya team are proposing to build a game development and gaming universe powered by blockchain technology. While this is project is both exciting and demanding, it is not entirely uncharted territory. Huntercoin is the name of a blockchain-based gaming experiment conducted by the Xaya team in 2013. It was a massively successful project that created records in more ways than one. It featured more than 35,000 characters controlled simultaneously in the game. Huntercoin was fully decentralized and autonomous, requiring solid state drives instead of servers or other infrastructure. This experiment was so successful that in few weeks, it achieved a market capitalization of almost $1 million. Progress made in Huntercoin included that it was:
- The world’s first decentralised massively multiplayer game
- The world’s first game world built entirely on the blockchain
- The world’s first human mining permissible cryptocurrency
Having worked on a similar project with much success, the Xaya team is best positioned to execute its vision with gurranteed success. It is obvious that Xaya will not look like an entirely new project to the team. The wealth of experience and enormous success recorded with Huntercoin will drive the team to deliver on its promises. To the team, Xaya is most likely a new dimension to huntercoin, with the following twist:
Being provably fair
Being decentralized and autonomous environments
True Item Ownership and fair acquisition
24/7 Up-time
Play to Earn gaming Experience
Fraud proof trading
Summary of Xaya Core Features
Xaya proposes to utilize blockchain technology to solve the major challenges affecting online gaming and game development. Here is a roundup of the technical features that the team will put in place to achieve and surpass their vision:
1. Atomic transactions : Xaya will use this feature to facilitate trustless trading of game assets and game-native cryptocurrencies in exchange for CHI. This is to promote velocity of and the demand for CHI token which will sustain the entire gaming universe.
2. Game channels : Game channels facilitates scalability of the platform by registering some of the gaming moves off chain. The final results of the game can be brought back on the blockchain to decide the winner. It is an extension of bitcoin payment channels to support real-time gaming while not overloading the network at the same time.
3. Ephemeral timestamps: If disputes arise in a game channel, they are solved using this feature. The Xaya team puts it pretty straight forward:
By mixing the time-stamping property of a blockchain, Merkle-ized hash commitments, amortised mining incentives, and fraud proofs in a clever way, we’ve been able to develop a new protocol that ensures that the occurring transaction fees can never be a loss for any honest participant.
Strategic Partnerships
The gaming industry is an already thriving one and has reached out to some industry leaders - or influencers - to strike off some partnership business with them. Consider some of them and why this move is strategic:
1. Soccer Manager: Soccer manager is a game played by millions of people all over the world. It allows players to buy teams, stadiums, join competitions, and other soccer business. Xaya partnered with Soccer manager because both parties will have mutual benefits from the partnership. Xaya will provide a blockchain-based platform for soccer manager. The benefits for Soccer Manager players includes:
- True ownership of In-game assets.
- provably fair gameplay
- Decentralized gaming, plus more
On the other hand, Xaya will reach out to millions of people who play Soccer Manager. If this crowd accept the services provided by Xaya, it will be a mass adoption of blockchain-based gaming. Soccer manager is already mainstream gaming which millions of people from all works of life play. Xaya's partnership was done to tap from this enormous crowd. Getting them to play soccer manager powered by Xaya will make Xaya a household name like Soccer Manager. And when players experience the excitement of playing games powered by the blockchain, they will tell their friends, who will in turn tell their friends. Gradually, Xaya will achieve mass adoption and enter mainstream gaming through Soccer manager.
Xaya and Virtual Reality
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Virtual reality lets people touch, feel and enter a virtual universe using audio and visual tools in a computer generated environment. This technology is resource intensive and requires some expensive development environment for the builders. It is much more like a virtual game. Blockchain technology has not been a perfect match for VR because of scalability issues. VR creates a virtual world and lets millions of people create objects and interact with one another simultaneously. This cannot happen in an environment limited by the number of transactions it can process.
Xaya can provide that missing link between VR and blockchain technology. The combination of game channels and Ephemeral timestamps will allow Xaya to power VR technology, allowing users and the virtual environment to grow and interact simultaneously. In VR, new objects are created almost always, and new players enter the environment. So the ability to grow and expand the environment will be powered by Xaya scaling techniques. This will make VR and Xaya a perfect match.
Beyond scalability, VR will also benefit from Xaya in many other ways. The ability to transform virtual ownership of items to a real one will be another benefit. People using VR technology can then buy land and other objects using virtual currency. The ability to monetize virtual property will be enhanced.
The type of games Xaya will feature
Xaya will support the main categories of online games that are currently popular. Developers will be attracted to work on games that people love to play. Below are some of them:
Collectible card games
Real-time strategy games (RTS)/ multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA)
Turn-based games
MMORPGs
Usecase
John is a talented upcoming game developer that loves soccer games. He has developed demo games with free tools available online. He wants to develop games for sale and reach out to millions of game players globally. However, he lacks the fund needed to do that kind of project. He needed to rent server space, buy expensive hardware and pay for other tools online. Discouraged, he decided to save some money over time while running his demo games online.
While searching for other free demo tools online, John came across Xaya and decided to investigate. He found that with Xaya, there are no fees for server and other infrastructure. Interestingly, John also found that all the tools needed to develop games if on the platform. John was really excited. With the little money he has in his savings, John bought CHI tokens and started to enjoy blockchain based game development on Xaya.
Roadmap
The coin - CHI
The native currency of Xaya that will power all transactions on the platform is called CHI. CHI is a utility token and will be used for virtually any trading and assets exchange operations such as the following:
- Account creation
- Account transactions
- Purchasing/renting game assets/accounts
- Game transactions
- CHI powered crowdsales
- Coin transactions
Coin Distribution
Coin Sale
A typical transaction on Xaya
Conclusion
Xaya is indeed a revolution in the gaming space that will solve all the glaring problems facing gamers and game developers. It will provide a provable fair gameplay for players, true ownership of assets and many others benefits. Xaya will entirely change the landscape of game development by hosting all the tools developers need on one platform. It will remove the financial bottleneck and overhead expenses that discourage developers who currently have to pay for server space, infrastructure and other admin subscription fees.Xaya will also achieve mass adoption with its partnership with Soccer manager and itts enormous work on blockchain scale. All these put together with the experienced team behind this project, the nature and scope of gaming and game development will get to a whole new level previously unknown.
Xaya Core
Xaya Advisors
Xaya Partners and Support
Watch this short intro video to learn more about Xaya
Find More Information about Xaya
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Image credits
Unless otherwise indicated, all images in this article were taken from contest post, the Xaya website and whitePaper.
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