CryptoFights Makes Infrastructure Upgrades for 2022
To keep up with increased demand and popularity, FYX Gaming is making serious upgrades to our infrastructure far beyond our most popular game CryptoFights, which has more than 200,000 registered users.
“These changes have impacted the whole company,” Ivan Assenov, Chief Technology Officer for FYX Gaming, said. “We started the process in August 2021, and we set a very clear path where we are going and how we are going to get there.”
The first step was to figure out what problem FYX Gaming needed to solve with these changes. We wanted to achieve where others had failed: scaling on Layer 1 blockchain using Proof of Work validation.
In the game CryptoFights, FYX Gaming produces and records each player’s moves and awards (NFTs) and stores it all on the blockchain.
“Without going into specifics I can tell you that we went into three different implementations of how transactions are broadcasted to miners and we expect to make another three changes for 2022,” said Assenov.
Assenov likens using the CryptoFights game to a Formula One race car to test their innovations. “From there,” he said, “we can build the Ferraris in the factory — aka FYX Gaming — based on what we learned on the racetrack.”
Preventing Double Spending and Latency
One of the problems we wanted to fix right away was the problem of double-spending*, which was running rampant, especially based on the volume of transactions we were pushing.
* Double-spending is what happens when a cryptocurrency is used at least twice, which means transaction information inside a blockchain can be altered under certain conditions, which also means the “alterer” can even reclaim their spent coins. It’s like buying a pair of sneakers at the store and then reaching into the cash register and taking your money back.
“The whole idea of blockchain in the first place was to prevent double spending!” said Adam Kling, CEO and founder of FYX Gaming. “We implemented an improved version of double-spending prevention and our work became contagious and we saw similar work done at the miners level.”
We looked at our entire system with a laser focus. We wanted to update our database and make it more contemporary. That way, we could ramp up our servers’ CPU and RAM to maximum efficiency. That makes a better gameplay experience for our end users.
We also took the time to improve our internal and external processes to resolve certain technical and business issues.
“Hardware and software can only do so much,” said Kling, “but they need to be bundled with sound processes so we can continue to grow.”
Why Was This Necessary?
We needed to make these numbers because we were having a wonderful problem: We were growing, and we needed to scale our performance without sacrificing game experience.
Scaling on Layer 1 blockchain lets us ramp up processing the number of transactions per second from 5–10 to hundreds to even thousands. We created a contemporary database that can process millions of records in under a second.
So let’s apply that kind of performance to a blockchain. For example, we know that 13 of 14 blockchains — outside of BSV (Bitcoin Satoshi Vision) — together have a total combined chain size of 1GB of data. (For comparison, Avengers: Age Of Ultron is 8.06 GB.)
“That is an absolutely ridiculous low amount for a database,” said Assenov. “Even the BSV chain is around 3GB, and FYX Gaming makes 95% of that data. We did that with between 1 million to 5 million daily transactions.”
We estimate there may be two or three blockchains that produce more transactions per day than BSV does. However, most blockchains are usually focused on the coin part and have mostly financial data, which makes them very small in size.
On the other hand, FYX Gaming’s transactions are organic and very rich, so a single transaction can be 1–4 KB, and even much, much bigger. That means we can start producing 20 million transactions daily, which means we can hit 1 GB in 7 weeks or so.
Which is why we had to create a contemporary database to be able to handle all of that data. We plan on handling hundreds of millions of transactions by the end of 2022 and running billions of transactions in 2023–24.
“That will put us into the realm of Big Data, which will open the door for other innovations we have been working on in order for us to become a significant player in the Metaverse and Web 3.0,” said Assenov.
What About CryptoFights?
We’re planning a major upgrade to CryptoFights as well, which we hope our 200,000 registered users will appreciate. We have such dedicated players, some of them spending eight hours a day playing, so we want to make sure the CryptoFights updates will meet with their approval.
“CryptoFights 2.0 will be the major new addition and also we have some major updates to the NFT marketplace system as well this year,” said Kling.
“We’re also increasing the melt values of our items won through gameplay so new users can experience how NFTs can be used with low friction and lets them monetize their gameplay.”
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