Games are a growing trend in crypto, with many games trying to be as "onchain" as possible in order to maximize composability. However, building onchain games can often lead to increased latency in the game as transactions need to settle to the underlying chain.

There are many directions projects are innovating in to try and reduce the latency while maintaining composability, with ZK cryptography being one of the most promising. In this paradigm, the goal is to enable players to play local-first, and then only synchronize with the chain as little as needed with a ZK proof of the actions they took.

ZK is poised to bring massive scalability to blockchains, enabling many use-cases that were previously too computationally expensive or required too many transactions to be viable before. However, ZK today often works in isolated environments which limits onboarding of users. Today, we'll cover how we've manage to connect EVM wallets (ex: MetaMask) to Mina Protocol so that users can interact with zkApps built using Mina Protocol without having to download a specialized wallet.

We've successfully created a Cardano smart contract that succeeds in reading Cardano NFT (CIP25) metadata directly (no oracles or trusted sources!), which unlocks a new range of use-cases from dynamic NFTs, NFT AMMs and new interoperability standards.

We've open sourced the smart contract, and provide this blog post as an dive into the approach behind it.

With many tools and frameworks to create games, GameMaker has stood the test of time as a beginner-friendly tool to easily create 2D experiences. To allow these developers to easily bring their skills to web3 to create fully decentralized experiences, we've created a GameMaker template for Paima Engine allowing developers to easily get started on their web3 journey.

Decentralized games currently mostly rely on recycling infrastructure built for decentralized finance applications to bootstrap their development at a lower cost. However, because these are not purpose-built solutions, they also drag in a lot of unintended consequences. We propose a new type of rollup we call Self-Sovereign Rollups that are purpose-built for gaming use-cases to unlock the next frontier of possibilities.

5 days ago, the mint for our latest game Tarochi (a decentralized RPG game) ended with a massive success, not only selling out of the 10K Genesis Trainer collection, but also ending with over 35,000 free mints for the Season 1 pass and over $350,000 TGOLD minted (TGOLD being the game currency that exists as an onchain token).

Today, as we distribute TGOLD to everyone, let's talk about the mint and the future of TGOLD.

It's no secret that Web2 games currently process more transaction than any web3 game can handle. Although more recent games like our onchain RPG game Tarochi handled hundreds of concurrent players at launch with no problem, online games like FF14 peaks at over 20,000 active players daily. Our goal, therefore, has to be to scale decentralized gaming experiences to the same player count. This post describes our plans on how to get there by leveraging ZK cryptography.

The Lattice team has recently announced Redstone - their new L2 built using their new contribution to OP Stack (the stack that powers the Optimism L2).

The question on everyone's mind is, therefore, "Should onchain games be built on this L2, and how does it compare to alternatives?". Many have been reaching out to our team at Paima Studios for our opinion given that we are one of the top builders of onchain games with games live on multiple chains, and so we will do our best to dive into the nuances.

On November 2nd, RFLXT has joined the Paima Ecosystem as a Paima Engine Professional - a group of entities dedicated to the growth and adoption of Web3 through usage of the Paima Engine. Having shown a deep understanding of the Paima ecosystem, RFLXT has become one of Paima Studio’s recommended partners for any new individual or company looking to join and build in the Paima ecosystem.

Paima Engine, the world’s largest rollup framework for creating onchain games, gamification and autonomous worlds, has received a grant equivalent to 1.4M USD from the Cardano blockchain. Cardano is the 5th largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, and has an on-chain treasury currently holding 350M USD in funds which it distributes based on a private (ZK) voting system where all Cardano holders vote on how to spend the treasury funds. To celebrate the announcement, Paima's source code has been made available publicly on Github.