The Strongest Link: Why Multichain is Best for GameFi

Innovations in blockchain gaming move at such breathtaking speeds that it can be difficult to keep up with developments as they happen. That said, games like Cryptopia have come up with some interesting ideas when it comes to building games on multiple chains.

In the past, traditional games often had various versions generated on different realms to get around data limits to their servers. In a similar fashion, developers can create versions of their games on different blockchains. The versions on each chain would be different—unique maps, different quantities of resources, and of course, different players.

So what advantages are there for having games be on multichain, and why should creators not limit themselves to a single blockchain? Let’s take a quick look.

Open Worlds

Blockchain games live and die by their processing speed. As a chain ecosystem grows more popular and developed, the underlying chain’s processing speed gets slower and its gas fees grow higher. This double whammy drives players to boredom and frustration. Thus, a game dependent on a single blockchain potentially carries the seeds of its downfall, becoming unsustainable over time. It gives no incentives for new players to come in and leaves long-time players sitting on their hands, waiting for the mass player inflow.

There are other possibilities: Players may be attracted to more recent entrants to the blockchain game industry, with better solutions and newer tech. A different chain may gain a windfall when they partner with big-named projects. Finally, you can’t discount the possibility of any chain getting hacked if it isn’t secure enough, driving players away.

A multichain scenario can mitigate these risks. Instead of being locked down to one blockchain, users may now cross over their assets from their original chain to another. This not only solves high gas fees and slow processing speed, but also gives users added flexibility to choose which chain they want to play in with the assets they possess.

What’s more, this feature opens the game to a wider audience. You can potentially access and leverage various communities by letting players bridge their assets to your game and vice versa. It means more transactions in your game’s economy, bringing new blood to your game’s economy, and improving your game’s reputation. If a particular chain gains a sudden jump in player count for some reason, you have the option of linking up with that chain.

The Dilution Problem and Cryptopia’s Solution

There are various ways to open your game to a multichain configuration. One of these is creating a copy of your game on other chains. There are, however, downsides to this approach—namely, the problem of dilution.

Duplicating your game means its resources (i.e. tokens) are also duplicated. This causes problems for your players who are holding in-game resources: the various copies dilute the in-game value of their assets. Traditional games may be copied across realms, but blockchain games have desirable assets and shouldn’t be duplicated—it defeats the purpose of having the game on the blockchain.

The upcoming game Cryptopia takes a different approach to this problem. Cryptopia’s dynamic gameplay involves building careers and business empires while using NFTs and cryptocurrencies as elements to build the game. To work, Cryptopia enables scarcity of resources and competition among players. These elements are essential to its gameplay—without them, Cryptopia would be like any other game.

To elaborate on this approach, NFTs can only exist in a single place at a time and should not be duplicated. However, NFTs can be moved across chains. For instance, you can transfer objects like weapons, armor, skins, pets, and vehicles from one realm to another. In Cryptopia terms, some of these NFTs would be ships, modules, blueprints, companions, loyalty cards, creatures, and tools. The one limitation is land tiles—these can’t be moved because they would create gaps in the Cryptopia map, and that’s something no one wants to see.

To maintain the required scarcity, Cryptopia aims to distribute resources across the different chains (or realms as they are called in Cryptopia) instead of duplicating them. Rather than copying the game to another blockchain, the idea is to move resources through a system of bridges, taking them out of one chain and putting them in another. These assets would be injected into a new realm as mineable resources, which players would then need to mine to obtain. The importance of the land tiles (title deeds) in the new realm will be partially determined by the scarcity and demand of the resources locked within that tile.

The result is a win-win: current players who already own resources benefit from greater scarcity, while new players in the new realm obtain the tile’s locked resources, and may enjoy playing Cryptopia on their favorite blockchain. Cryptopia also benefits from more players playing the game, which translates to a more vibrant in-game economy. As for the distribution of fungible assets, they could be asymmetrically distributed according to the community size of the respective chains; the more players, the more resources like gold, iron, and uranium will be locked in that chain’s land tiles.

With Cryptopia gaining access to a wider community and its in-game resources distributed across the different chains and realms, more players will be attempting to access them. This drives up demand and makes these resources scarcer. Clever players can then take advantage of arbitrage opportunities.

These are just a few of the lessons we can draw from Cryptopia’s design.

Future-Proofing the Game

The Cryptopia experiment presents interesting ideas: blockchain game developers should consider not tying their code too closely to a single blockchain. As no one can tell what the future brings, it’s best to build games with a flexible architecture.

From the beginning, Cryptopia has taken the multichain approach. The codebase features a flexible blockchain service layer and a concrete implementation for EVM-compatible blockchains. This leaves room for different kinds of implementations in the future.

For instance, they're experimenting with a Substrate implementation, allowing them to publish a realm to a custom and specialized blockchain. The dedicated Cryptopia chain would be added as a Parachain to the Polkadot ecosystem. This would allow the game to scale, migrate gas fees, and run at near Web2 speeds without relying on Web2 infrastructure.

Cryptopia has implemented various other features to future-proof the game. For instance, it operates on a decentralized mesh network composed of nodes. Completely run by players, these nodes will facilitate network traffic like in-game chatting, precise live positioning of players, interactions with other players, and so on.

Finally, Cryptopia features a Multisig wallet, providing players with both a high level of security and the convenience of having a wallet in-game. As other blockchain projects are facing similar challenges in making a seamless gaming experience, the features Cryptopia has designed will be available for other developers to use.

In summary, Cryptopia’s solutions work to future-proof itself. The game is designed to plug into different blockchains, and should one blockchain fail, Cryptopia will continue to exist, hewing to the truism of not putting all your eggs in one basket. By spreading the risks, developers can mitigate the downsides while opening up their game to bigger opportunities. The future lies in flexibility.

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