
Hello everyone! I’m Aleksey, the Chief Technical Officer at Expload. We’re making a platform where you can create and distribute blockchain-powered games, donate fiat, and do other kinds of things.
A Glimpse into the Expload Platform
Firstly, there’s a blockchain where everything’s executed. Secondly, there’s a game distribution system. Thirdly, there’s a legal solution to steer blockchain games out of the black market into the legally regulated environment.
What we have is the Pravda Blockchain, Expload as such and the developer’s game. Expload runs both on the user’s local machine and on the centralized server. The latter accommodates a Secure Key Vault and an API Server. Pravda’s comprised of the same-name network and SDK, which is needed to interact with this network. The game’s made up of a client and a server.

Pravda Blockchain
I’d start off with describing the Pravda Blockchain that underpins Expload. It consists of the nodes distributed over the Pravda Network. The nodes run on the virtual machine, Pravda VM, whose execution results are stored in two locations: State Storage and Effects Storage. The virtual machines and states are synchronized by means of Tendermint, a Byzantine consensus, with its own Block Storage that keeps information about the blockchain. All is interconnected, including the nodes, and we can view the blocks in the block explorer.

At present, our blockchain uses the Proof-of-Authority consensus algorithm, meaning, it’s partially centralized, which is often the case with blockchain startups. This is because we want our protocol to be updated quickly, without the involvement of independent miners. We’re going to use Proof-of-Authority to stabilize our platform until it reaches a certain degree of maturity. We have a universal blockchain, which is based on Pradva VM.
Pravda VM
Let’s have a deeper look at Pravda VM. This is a Turing complete, stack-based virtual machine. It knows what data types are currently operated by the programs, and it’s fully deterministic — when knowing the input we can always predict the output. I would especially emphasize that we have Turing complete programs, rather than smart contracts. Programs are modifiable, and this is exactly why we don’t call them smart contacts. You can come across the word “smart contract” in our marketing texts, but we avoid using it in the technical documents for clarity purposes. Smart contracts imply immutability, while our programs are modifiable. Hence, they aren’t smart contracts. However, for those who value the spirit of blockchain and are faithful to Nick Sabo and Satoshi Nakamoto’s legacy, there’s a possibility to “seal” the program. In such an instance it can be called a true smart contract — a sealed program can’t be modified.

Expload Platform
As concerns Expload, this is a centralized solution, which is built atop the Pravda Blockchain. We have our own API Server, a centralized component. This is a classic application that enables card acquiring and exchange of tokens, and stores metadata about games that are traded or operated on our platform. Besides this, we have another centralized component — a Secure Key Vault. In a nutshell: there’re casual players who need to log in somehow. They have certain habits. For instance, they don’t encrypt their hard drive, they keep forgetting their password and make a code word using the digits 123123. Especially for such folks, there’s a default option to authorize in a classic way — using a traditional, recoverable username/password pair to log into the Secure Key Vault. This is where we store the keys, which are handed over to the user once they’ve entered their credentials. They’re kept on their local machine’s desktop application. This way, we provide a more customary user experience, while also preserving the “blockchainness”. However, one may choose to use their keys directly without having to authorize in the Secure Key Vault — just go to the API Server and sign their transactions using their private key, which they manage themselves.

In other words, casual players store their data in the Secure Key Vault. This is an independent secured server. It’s in no way connected to the rest of Expload’s infrastructure, which is unaware of the private keys. Advanced gamers and users, crypto anarchists and crypto enthusiasts manage their keys by themselves. And, most importantly: once a user has upgraded from casual to advanced, they are granted full rights to their private keys.
What’s in the Pipeline
Where are we ultimately going to and what else can you expect? Once we decide that our platform’s mature enough, we’ll switch to an absolutely unpopular Proof-of-Work (PoW). But it’s guaranteed secure and guaranteed good. PoS and DPoS haven’t yet proved themselves, while PoW has gained trust and credibility. In addition to desktop applications, we’re going to support web and mobile versions. We’re also looking to add zsnarks validation to our virtual machine. You know how it’s trendy and cool… And, being open to suggestions, we’ve already published everything in the open source to find early adopters who would join us in our effort.

