Bots Can Read The Board Before You 🎮
Every onchain game has the same weak spot, which is that the game state has to sit somewhere a program can read it, and anything a program can read a script can read too.
On $SOL that means every account is open to anyone running a node, so a mining game with hidden tiles does not really have hidden tiles, only tiles most players never bothered to look up.
The bots always bother.
It is the reason so much onchain gaming ends up as a race between scripts, with the human players funding it.
Card games, fog of war, sealed loot drops, anything built on something the player is not supposed to know yet, has been close to impossible to put fully onchain for exactly this reason.
ZINC is the counterexample I keep pointing people at.
It is a proof-of-work mining game on Solana, live since May 26, and its tile logic runs sealed on Arcium, where the inputs are split into fragments across a cluster of nodes and no single node ever holds the whole layout.
The game still gets the correct result back, and every outcome settles on Solana as an ordinary public transaction anyone can check.
So the game can be verified after the fact even though nobody could read the board before it.
When I opened the Arcium explorer this morning most of the live computation feed was ZINC, part of more than 2.5 million computations the network has run since Mainnet Alpha went live on February 2.
Hidden information is what makes most games worth playing, and I think the genre that moves onchain properly next is whichever one can finally keep a secret.
#Gaming #Solana
Every onchain game has the same weak spot, which is that the game state has to sit somewhere a program can read it, and anything a program can read a script can read too.
On $SOL that means every account is open to anyone running a node, so a mining game with hidden tiles does not really have hidden tiles, only tiles most players never bothered to look up.
The bots always bother.
It is the reason so much onchain gaming ends up as a race between scripts, with the human players funding it.
Card games, fog of war, sealed loot drops, anything built on something the player is not supposed to know yet, has been close to impossible to put fully onchain for exactly this reason.
ZINC is the counterexample I keep pointing people at.
It is a proof-of-work mining game on Solana, live since May 26, and its tile logic runs sealed on Arcium, where the inputs are split into fragments across a cluster of nodes and no single node ever holds the whole layout.
The game still gets the correct result back, and every outcome settles on Solana as an ordinary public transaction anyone can check.
So the game can be verified after the fact even though nobody could read the board before it.
When I opened the Arcium explorer this morning most of the live computation feed was ZINC, part of more than 2.5 million computations the network has run since Mainnet Alpha went live on February 2.
Hidden information is what makes most games worth playing, and I think the genre that moves onchain properly next is whichever one can finally keep a secret.
#Gaming #Solana
