vElemental Battles
When Block.one unveiled their code for the EOSIO blockchain, they envisioned their creation serving as the home of decentralized applications. In order to onboard talented developers to the EOS ecosystem and get them started with smart contract development, they created Elemental Battles, a game-based tutorial set in a fantasy world.
The DAPP Network has been live for over a week now, and we decided to showcase its capabilities by using the vRAM System to remove the RAM requirements for Elemental Battles.
Both gamers and blockchain enthusiasts live on the cutting edge, seeking out novel innovations to enhance their online experience. With EOS looking to cement its place as the home of the decentralized application, gaming could prove to be the first use-case to attract a critical mass of users to its network.
End-to-end Decentralization
For applications to achieve true end-to-end decentralization each system component must be sufficiently decentralized. With the vRAM System, the smart contracts executing on the backend, the user-facing frontend content and the database relevant to the application can all run entirely without a centralized server.
IPFS as a Decentralized Frontend Solution
Instead of storing user-facing application frontend on a centralized server which becomes responsible for delivering the content any time it is requested, the DAPP Network allows developers to register application frontend on IPFS, with the network serving as an on-chain registry with links to IPFS. IPFS, a decentralized data storage solution, distributes files across a peer-to-peer network and uses content-based addressing to access a given file (This excellent introduction has more information on IPFS.)
Merging IPFS with an on-chain DAPP registry may open up a world of possibilities for potential services which DSPs could offer. DAPP Service Providers could potentially host frontend pages, data and resources by providing an IPFS pinning service or even enable contracts to access their frontend through simple addressing by providing a discovery service through their API.
The vRAM System as a Decentralized Database Solution
Before vRAM was born, dApp developers needed to permanently store significant amounts of data on EOS RAM in order to access it from within their smart contracts. However, the limitations of RAM has hampered scalable dApps with true end-user utility from appearing on the mainnet .vRAM enables EOS RAM to be what it was intended to become, a lightweight cache layer for storing in-use dApp data only. It separates permanent memory functionality from EOS RAM, allowing it to serve as a whiteboard for in-use data. dApp developers can utilize DAPP Service Providers (DSPs) to keep their smart contract data on IPFS and use the vRAM System to efficiently retrieve information required by their smart contract’s action. Cryptographic proofs ensure the integrity of the data stored in the DSPs file system, minimizing the amount of RAM a dApp smart contract requires in order to access the data.
A reference of the vRAM-based version of the Elemental Battles card game can be found on the LiquidApps Github repository.
EOS.IO as a Decentralized Backend Layer
vElemental Battles, like any other decentralized application running on EOS, contains a smart contract which lives on-chain and defines the scope of acceptable actions a user can take when interacting with the dApp. EOS acts as the settlement layer and the source of consensus for dApps.
A True Example of a Fully Decentralized Game
By allowing dApps to store their data sets permanently on IPFS nodes hosted by DSPs and turn RAM into a lightweight cache layer, vRAM empowers gaming developers to create a new generation of scalable applications on the blockchain.
As demonstrated by vElemental Battles, combining EOS as the consensus layer with IPFS as the decentralized frontend and vRAM as the decentralized database enables end-to-end decentralization and brings scalable blockchain games that much closer to reality.
