Reducing Gas Fees in the Arena of Exiles (AoE) dApp Ecosystem
Hello fellow Exiles! We wanted to address the legitimate concern of gas fees that many of our community members have been bringing up. This article will describe the design of the Arena of Exiles (AoE) dApp’s ecosystem so that our community members can be at ease knowing we’ve done our best to develop a system with gas fees in mind. So, let’s take a look at what happens when someone buys an NFT from our store, what gets stored on the blockchain and what we store in our dApp’s API database.
How does the Arena of Exiles dApp interact with the blockchain?
Figure 1. A high level diagram of the Arena of Exiles dApp ecosystem
Let’s break down the different ways in which the AoE dApp interacts with our contracts on the blockchain:
- Checking what Card Packs are available for sale
- Buying Card Packs
- Minting NFTs
- Checking NFT ownership
- Claiming promo packs we have rewarded to our community members
So out of the 5 interactions above, which ones require gas fees? As you probably guessed, numbers 2, 3 and 5 require gas.
What have we done to reduce the gas fees required?
Here’s a high level summary of what we’ve done to minimize gas fees:
- Make our game free to play
- Perform Buy and Mint in a single transaction
- Perform all interactions that do not have to do with minting NFTs off-chain
Simply put, only aspects requiring payment collection and NFT minting will require gas fees for interacting with the blockchain. Everything else will be handled by the AoE API we custom-built for our dApp.
Making our game free to play
Every Exile that creates an account on our website will be given a starter bundle of 25 cards that they can use to create a deck and play our game. These cards are not minted to the blockchain and, therefore, are not NFTs.
Perform Buy and Mint in a single transaction
In an effort to minimize the overall gas paid, we’ve combined (2) Buying a Card Pack and (3) Minting NFTs into 1 transaction. This reduces the amount of base gas fees you have to pay in order to own the NFTs you have purchased.
Perform all Non-Purchase and Non-Mint Interactions Off-chain
We handle Deck Building and AoE Game Matchmaking Results and Rankings, off-chain. The decks that you create and use to challenge other Exiles in our game are all stored in our dApp API’s Cloud Database. Similarly, all match results and season leaderboard rankings are stored in our dApp API’s Cloud Database as well.
Know of other ways to reduce minting costs?
We know that minting is expensive on the Ethereum blockchain and are continuously looking for better, more effective ways to minimize these costs. If you have suggestions, please feel free to reach out to us on our Discord server.
Links:
Discord: https://discord.gg/arenaofexiles
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ArenaOfExiles
