ZkNoid participated the first twitter space organized by zkok.io. On the space we was glad to see the interest of community in ZK gaming. A lot of interesting questions was asked. Here are our answers for the most intriguing topics
What are the big challenges incorporating Zk into gaming (E.g. resistance from development teams proving times, adoption) what attempts are being made to solve them?
Early stage technologies
Many projects on Mina, whether applications or infrastructure, remain immature. While there are a few production-ready projects, the majority are still under development. This results in a lack of tools available for ZKApp developers and poor documentation for existing tools, necessitating much of the development work to be done from scratch.
Another issue with early-stage technology is the absence of established standards for developers. Each team often builds solutions independently, leading to a lack of unification and potential security vulnerabilities.
Long proof generation
Proof generation is a computationally heavy task and takes a while for users to complete, especially on low-performance machines. The single-threaded nature of browser environments worsens this issue, resulting in a poor user experience and limitations on the complexity of logic that can be implemented.
Low block production speed on some blockchains
Some ZK blockchains have low transaction throughput. For instance, Mina produces a block every three minutes with up to 24 transactions per block. This is insufficient to meet the demands of popular applications, forcing users to resort to L2 solutions or migrate to other blockchains, at the cost of some unique ZK features.
Hard to implement proof of time
Almost every game relies on time in some capacity. In traditional games, time is calculated locally on the user’s machine for single-player games or on a central server for multiplayer games. In web3, relying on local time or a centralized server is not secure enough. One option is to use blockchain time, which offers an approximation or timestamp per block. However, the slow transaction speeds can introduce significant latency, negatively impacting gameplay. Additionally, relying on blockchain time means that all transactions must be processed on-chain, increasing costs for users.
Hard to audit
A crucial aspect of smart contract development is auditing. However, ZK technology is not yet widely adopted, meaning few auditing firms offer ZK proof audits. Those that do often charge prohibitively high prices, making it inaccessible for small companies.
Bad UX
Zero-knowledge approaches are not intuitive for users and can often cause confusion, leading to a poor ZK user experience. Proof generation, interacting with appchains, and proving moves require extensive UI explanations, loaders, and user-friendly interfaces. Popular ZK gaming patterns need unification, simplification, and well-developed design to enhance usability.
Hard to implement ZK
There is a significant barrier to entry for game developers wishing to utilize true ZK. Leveraging the power of ZK in games requires a deep understanding of cryptography and substantial infrastructure research and implementation. Furthermore, there are limited guides and educational materials available to support new developers in this space.
Low liquidity in some ZK blockchains. Weak defi infrastructure because of the paradigm change requires to find the new approaches for.
ZK blockchains like Mina Protocol bring the paradigm change look on the on-chain executions. Instead of smartcontracts executions by validators, contract is evaluated on client side and proof of the specific state change is verified by validators. Because of this most of the DeFi approaches needs to be reworked. ZK blockchains often have a very limited amount of memory slots, several per one zkApp. This makes it impossible to store balances mapping. Such solutions as to keep the merkle root of the balances info stored off-chain or to deploy zkApps for every user-balance associations bring some new experience when dealing with tokens.
Difficult to build a sustainable business model because some of common business model are not applicable for zkApps
As mentioned above, dealing with assets for zkApps works in a different way. For example it’s not so easy end essential for ZK blockchains to launch an NFT collection and make it tradable
Where would you like to see ZK Gaming in 5 years from now?
Despite the challenges and limitations outlined above, we have positive expectations for the future of ZK gaming and ZK technology in general. Here’s how we expect current issues to be resolved over the next five years:
Growing strong ecosystem of zkApps
In five years, we anticipate the field to be much more mature, with numerous ZK projects running on Mina and other ZK blockchains. By then, the infrastructure will not only be ready for convenient use but also be time-proven.
Long proof generation solving
We expect significant improvements in current proving systems and the development of new ones. Additionally, there may be a combination of different proving systems using recursive proofs, allowing us to leverage the best aspects of each system.
Another way to address this issue is to use proof cloud computing with homomorphic encryption for scenarios where the circuit is too complex to be computed on the user’s machine.
Furthermore, we foresee the emergence of new patterns in the ZK space that will enable the generation of fewer proofs without compromising security, possibly through integration with optimistic approaches.
Speeding up the low block production speed on some blockchains
We anticipate an increase in transaction throughput on L1 blockchains, but our main focus will be on L2/L3 solutions. Several projects are currently in development for Mina, and we expect them to be in production soon.
Implementation of proof of time
We expect the implementation of decentralized time providers and the creation of innovative game patterns and mechanics that will eliminate the need for time-dependent processes.
More audit opportunities and quality
In five years, we foresee significant growth in ZK applications and the ZK segments of auditing companies. As more ZK projects are audited, auditors will identify more issues, and the increased volume of ZK audits will lead to lower costs for individual audits.
Good UX wrappings for ZK experience
We expect users to become more familiar with ZK applications in general. Additionally, we anticipate the development of numerous ZK UX patterns that will help developers create more user-friendly interfaces with which users will be comfortable.
User friendly ZK development
In five years, we expect to see many projects with detailed guides on how to use them. New developers will have access to a vast array of learning materials and reusable projects.
We expect more projects to be developer-focused, providing SDKs or building blocks. At @ZkNoid, we are committed to delivering the best SDK for gamers and a platform where games can be published.
Increased liquidity in ZK blockchains. Mature defi infrastructure
The new approaches for DEXes, landings, bridged will be discovered. The stable token standard will be introduced.
More ways of zkApps monetizations
After several iterations of zkApps launches it would be clear what business models are well suited to zkApps. Liquidity would be easily connected to the zkApps assets
