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While I transcribe, I am not aiming to make them 100% word for word. I will cut out various banter and things that may not make sense, or things that I think are unneeded. I will also tweak verbiage used from each speaker, if necessary, to help with clarity. These are transcribed with ~90%-95% accuracy.
Anything with an underline is a link. Underlined speaker names are links to timestamps in the recording.
Table of Contents:
1. Introduction
2. Questions
3. Closing
Original Recording (begins at the 2:46 timestamp):
Speakers: Synapse, Frisky Fox, Magnus Ironroot
Synapse Discord: Synapse Protocol
☍ Introduction
Synapse
Why don’t we go ahead and get started! A quick introduction about Synapse. We’re a cross chain bridge and we’ve been working with DeFi Kingdoms to bridge assets and messaging. This essentially allows users to bridge heroes among the different realms that DeFi Kingdoms offers. Over the course of the past year we’ve facilitated something along 1.5 million transactions across the three realms that DeFi Kingdoms has been on, in addition to other token assets as well.
We’ll focus here on a lot of things on the road map to enhance how DeFi Kingdoms thinks about cross chain gaming right now, as well as security improvements.
Frisky Fox
From the very start we had this planning for DeFi Kingdoms to be across chain. A lot of people ask us, “Why do you want to be cross chain, what’s the point of that?”
There’s a lot of reasons why. You can get access to more users, more liquidity, more presence in the web3 world. From the concept of the gameplay, you have a lot of games online with servers all over the world, or games with certain realms their game is on… so we envisioned this where each chain is a different “realm” in our game. You can have them on Avalanche, Klaytn, Harmony for example. Where players can switch their chain to experience a different realm. A part of that utilizing bridges, like your, to move their heroes or other assets to cross over from one realm to another. So the plan is to really just create an experience that’s very in-game feeling when switching chains. Part of solving that is including things like how to make that feel like an in-game experience and who do we work with, like Synapse.
Magnus Ironroot
Hey everybody! We’ve been super excited for the last 9 months or so to use Synapse for both our hero bridge and our pet bridge. It’s been a great experience so far and I’ve been really pleased with the security you all have.
☍ Questions
[Question #1][Question #2][Question #3]
[Question #4][Question #5][Question #6]
[Question #7]
Q #1
Synapse
Frisky, I’m curious, what was the impetus for cross chain gaming. You all are kind of one of the first protocols to go across chain with a meaningful use case. I’m just curious, what’s the thought process behind creating different realms and moving between them, versus migrating the game somewhere else?
A ☍
Frisky Fox
Originally we had this ideology that, in the traditional gaming world, you have these platforms of networks, like Xbox, Playstation, etc with their own followings … so some developers would only launch on Xbox, or PlayStation, or maybe all of them. So that’s how we envisioned the blockchain world as well. Where certain chains would certain users that just want to stay on that chain, they want to stay there. So we want to go to them, while yet also having a cool way to interact with in-game that can connect those players if they wanted to. There’s obviously more liquidity and users, which are important, but I like to say, “we choose to do it not because it’s easy, but because it’s hard.” That’s where the exciting things are. It’s pushing the envelope in this ecosystem, that’s what we’re all about.
Synapse
That’s a really interesting way to view the cross chain space. I think this specific use case has finally found a product market to fit for cross chain travel — I’m interested to see where that leads to.
Q #2
Synapse
So, where do you see cross chain gaming evolving from here? What do you see being built, what do you want to be built?
A ☍
Frisky Fox
Yah, I think step 1 is to have reliable bridges, it provides the backbone of the in-game economy to have the full realization of the real world market place built straight into the game. Come in to swap whatever asset easily, and while you’re playing you can earn fish to go sell those for Ethereum, or any other token.
In other games you can only trade assets in that game for other assets in that game. There might be a black market where players can sell their in-game gold for real world money … this is built in to ours to attach those assets to the real world economy.
I’d like to see us have “outposts” on other chains. Maybe we don’t have an actual realm on Ethereum, but we can put an “outpost” there, or an interface, that can facilitate some areas of our protocol available on that chain — like the auction house, or etc. So instead of other people building from scratch, those developers can use our outposts for that as well. It leads to a ready player one metaverse kind of thing, where you can have these assets from other games show up and be used in this metaverse protocol.
Synapse
There’s definitely a ton that can be done. I’m excited to see where you all are pushing this space.
Q #3
Synapse
What are the trade-offs of developing a cross chain game and what are the page winners?
A ☍
Magnus Ironroot
Right now I would say, with the current state of blockchain and the EVM, our challenge is doing as much computation as we need to on chain and making that cost effective. We spent a lot of time refactoring our contracts to make them more efficient and expandable as we evolve our ecosystem. We have about 300+ contracts now. We’ve spent a lot of time meshing those together and making them cross chain. It’s been really great to use Synapse for that, we’ve been able to build in our application logic into your bridge. Like attributes specific to our heroes, such as XP. Soon, we’ll be expanding to be bridging even more data behind our heroes, like our flag storage system. So, if a hero participated in an event like the Perilous Journey, we can have that follow them no matter what chain they’re on — or other valuable data that makes a hero more desirable.
Synapse
I think you hit the nail on the head there. Particularly with the complexity of how dApps grow. The onus seems to be on the messaging protocols to create interfaces to make dApps to build their own custom logic. I think that’s one thing we really try to do, and dApps are already extremely complicated. There’s a lot to do from a developers standpoint, to make templates and etc, to help move the space forward.
Q #4
Synapse
I want to dive a bit more into the mechanics of the cross chain messaging and how it’s used, etc. Magnus, can you give a high level to the people in the crowd? What is DeFi Kingdom’s cross chain implementation and what happens on the backend when a user tries to bridge a hero or a pet?
A ☍
Magnus Ironroot
Sure! Basically, say a player has a hero NFT on DFKChain and they want to move it to Serendale on Klaytn. The user will initiate a transaction with the bridge contract, on the DFKChain side of things, then the Synapse relayer will pick up that transaction, make sure it’s legitimate, take care of the security assumptions, then play that message on the receiving chain (Klaytn). Then the relayer will interact with the smart contracts and send all the metadata associated with that hero — then it will mint that hero on that chain (if it wasn’t transferred before), or it will unlock the hero on that chain if it was already there.
Synapse
I appreciate that! I think one of the big things that a lot of users don’t undestand is how it works, so any transparency on that is good — but maybe even the obfuscation of that is good for keeping the emersion in place. The architecture behind that is fantastic.
Q #5
Synapse
Why do you all think the cross chain dynamic is interesting to the DeFi Kingdoms’ users?
A ☍
Frisky Fox
I think you hit the nail on the head, not about obfuscating, but making it more of an emersion experience. The goal is to the lower the barrier and experience the blockchain in a fun and educational way. One of the impetus to start this project, I was trying to explain how staking and DeFi works to some of my family… and their response was just, “I don’t get it.” So I thought, “I wish I could find a way to make it easier to explain.” So that’s just one of the seeds that started this whole project.
We want things to be more seamless, for example, how many of us here are actually thinking about the internet powering everything behind what we’re doing? Most people don’t think about it, because it just works. If you look back to the early days, in the 80s and 90s, you had to be very involved with knowing your ISP, your IP, etc. I think that’s the future for blockchain as well. I think many things in the future will be powered by the blockchain and regular users won’t have to think about it.
You have people ask, “why create a game on the blockchain?” You have a lot of reasons for that. It’s trustless and you’re in control of the assets, you’re not the whim of a company who wants to just involuntarily change your assets. This is the next step of online gaming, you can have sort of sovereignty and interoperability with your assets. I think that will be very important.
Part of that process is that if we’re on all these chains with a decentralized setup, we have to make sure the bridging protocol is trustless. This is something I really enjoy with Synapse and how you’ve built your bridges.
Synapse
Thanks! When it comes to people asking why we build games on the blockchain I think it’s super clear that it should be on the blockchain. I can’t remember how many times I’ve been on a random Discord server trying to find someone to trade real world money for an asset in game. There’s a ton of interesting things happening in the blockchain gaming space that will be interesting.
Q #6
Synapse
What are current qualms that you all have with the current cross blockchain messaging system? What do you want to see added with cross chain messaging later?
A ☍
Frisky Fox
I think magnus will have a lot to say about this. First of all, we’ve seen a huge increase in the quality of the developer experience so far. There’s a lot more solutions out there than from a year ago, it’s much easier and seamless. There’s huge advantages there, even with just Synapse. Ever since launch we’ve seen your improvement as well.
I think being trustless out of the box is important. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time, just focus on the things that are important as well.
Magnus Ironroot
There’s a few different things I would like to see in terms of cross chain messaging protocols. First and foremost, we need better developing tooling to make it easier to test and simulate across chain — I would love to see us approach the usability of something like AWS or Google Cloud.
Next I would like to see tooling with better visibility with what’s happening across chains. It’s ok right now, but you have to know something about that transaction to see the destination and etc. If we had analytics for the flow across blockchain, it would be nice.
And lastly I would like to see more cross chain messaging standards — especially with smart contract interactions. There’s not one accepted way to pass data across chains, it’s kind of bespoke. I would like the industry to come together on that.
Synapse
Awesome! The fact that we need the developers that needt o get to the level of AWS and Google Cloud means we’re moving in the right direction. Lets move on and wrap up some last things.
Q #7
Synapse
I’m curious, what are the current exciting things going on in the DeFi Kingdoms ecosystem?
A ☍
Frisky Fox
Yah, we’re getting pretty close to having a new launch. We’re going to have some pretty big news for that very soon, that I won’t spoil here. It’s essentially a whole new part of the game where you use hero NFTs beyond just questing. Sort of like combat related quests, our NFT heroes have all of their state on the blockchain: including stats, abilities, levels, etc. Our players have been actively leveling up their heroes, choosing their stats to be geared towards certain builds. So once we launch this next part of the game, it will open up utility for those attributes — including Guilds, subclasses, etc. There will be opportunities to have new aspects then after that, like crafting and etc. Players can build up their experience and work toward end goals with greater results — super stoked about it. Just rying to get across that finish line
☍ Closing
Synapse
Sounds like you guys have a lot of stuff on the road map in the near term — excited to see where it ends up. That is all the questions I have for today, but I do want to open it up to a Q&A if anyone has any questions. Feel free to raise your hand for questions if you have any
Frisky Fox
I did just want to add one thought about combat in general. A lot of other protocols and games out there, like Axie Infinity, started out just doing combat, growing off of that one feature. We have a bunch of things going with ours, we’re stoked to expand on not only just combat. We don’t want that to be just that one feature you go to the game for.
Synapse
Somehow DFK finds a way to be more and more fun, which I find not to the be the case with other games — they feel so static. I appreciate everyone hopping on to this space and to learn a little about cross messaging with DFK, where the technology is at, where it’s going.
The contributors to our Synapse DAO has been doing a lot of work to help with cross chain messaging and making it easier for developers. We find it’s really difficult to build dApps on chain in the present. So thanks everyone for your attendance and I appreciate you stopping by.
Frisky Fox
Thanks for having us!
