What belongs on a blockchain?
How we are not using Web3 tech.
“Web3” is an almost-meaningless term. Heck, while we’ve been dabbling with 2s and 3s, some say it goes all the way up to Web5 (which seems excessive). “Web3” is almost-meaningless because any product that even-tangentially touches a “blockchain” (public, private, PoS, PoW, centralized, decentralized, etc) is considered “Web3”. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some products exist in lock-step with blockchain transactions, where every user action requires Byzantine agreement from some large fraction of The Network.
“Web3”, as it turns out, is not some binary criteria. Instead, it is a continuum of possibility. An adjective; an attempt to describe an intent at maybe openness or trust or non-censorship or some other capital-I-Ideal. And at the very least, “Web3” is a buzzword tacked on to a product in the hope that it might attract a modicum of investment.
As more and more products discover that putting everything on a blockchain actually destroys user experience with no clear benefit, the question of “Web3-ness” is something that needs wrestled with early and often.
What, then, does Spyre put on a blockchain and more importantly: why?
What are blockchains good at?
You may recognize this question. We asked a similar one in our post on why we’re not using Unity to build games. What can I say, we’re pragmatic. We use things when they benefit a product, not just when an industry feels like it’s necessary. This means we don’t shove a blockchain where it’s nothing but a buzzword.
Blockchains are good at some things:
- Agreeing on things.
- Security.
- Bookkeeping.
Blockchains are also bad at a LOT of things:
- Speed.
- Cost.
- Ease of use.
Many Web3 evangelists disagree. “Solana’s TPS is through the roof!” they say. “That’s cute,” says Postgres.
Look, blockchains have come a long way — I’m not trying to be dismissive. They have not, however, outstripped conventional web-scale products that power the world’s largest software products. And that is just fine, because they have different use cases. Comparing Postgres and a blockchain does a disservice to both technologies.
Spyre doesn’t put everything on a blockchain. Relational databases and CDNs exist, and they are generally pretty great at some things. So what can Web3 actually do for us that either Web2 can’t, or Web2 just isn’t very good at?
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For starters: money.
This one might be sound silly, but as it turns out, Web3 has something tangible to offer here.
Spyre games are real cash, skill-based tournaments. This means that players enter matches with cash, play a game, and the winner gets the pot. In the Web2 world, there is no realistic way to accomplish this without a middleman.
Likely, you’d integrate a payment processor like Stripe. They offer great service, are simple(ish) to integrate, and have broad support. The downside is that Stripe takes 2.9% of your transaction + 30¢. This may not be the end of the world when you’re selling a product for $50, but it sure hurts. This is, however, absolutely business-breaking when you offer tournament entry for $0.60. Micro-transactions are tricky because payments need to be bundled together to minimize transaction costs, and even then they may simply not be supported.
This is only the first issue.
We also need bank accounts for every single person that plays, so that we can accrue their winnings. Stripe does offer something for this but it’s even more expensive. Further, we need the ability for users to get their money back out. In the Web2 world, this means that you pay a bank for a money transfer. Eek. Some skill-based platforms even charge you for that savings account.
With a blockchain, things are a bit different. Let’s go down the list:
- Our current on-ramp takes 0%. That is, right now $10.00 US dollars from your bank account gets you exactly 10 USDC. No transaction fees. No gas fees.
- We can create non-custodial savings accounts on-chain with our GameWallet smart contract. No bank is needed. Don’t trust us, read the 460 lines of code yourself.
- We keep Know Your Customer (KYC) and Anti-Money-Laundering (AML) guarantees of banks through trusted on-ramps as well as SEC-compliant USDC. You can literally look at the BlackRock managed fund you’re buying into right here.
As you can see, a blockchain isn’t just for show here. It changes the underlying economics for how skill-based gaming can work.
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Public, verifiable leaderboards
A central pillar of our game design is a hearty leaderboard system.
Players compete in matches, rise to the top of leaderboards, and are rewarded for their engagement with a variety of on-chain and off-chain loot-boxes. Our roadmap is still being worked on, but there is the potential to do some pretty cool stuff here, from USDC to NFTs to sponsored ERC20 to governance token — but we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
You should Google two phrases: “counter strike leaderboards rigged” and “airdrop fairness”. Do you see where I’m going with this? There is an intersection of problems here.
Conventional skill-based games in the Web2 space do not have the ability to provide transparency. Web3 games have no ability to distribute fair airdrops. If only…
The obvious answer is to stick match information on a blockchain. This is akin to seeing Magnus Carlson’s chess history on chess.com (scroll to page 11 for his most recent loss — seriously, the guy is a machine), except of course that people still don’t trust chess.com (“maybe they changed something?”), I can’t make a game that also uses their rating system (how good is Magnus at the genre defining game of HANGMAN CLASH??), and chess.com doesn’t share the system it uses to calculate skill rating to begin with.
Blockchains do not magically solve all of these problems outright, but they give us a key piece of technology that helps us establish credibility. And credibility is what we need to earn a player’s trust.
What’s next?
Only TWO THINGS are on a blockchain??? Shouldn’t every asset be on IPFS??? Shouldn’t every player action be recorded until the heat death of the universe on the Ethereum World Computer??? Is this even Web3???
If you’ve been following along with our blog posts, you’ve got to be sick of hearing this, but here I am saying the same thing again: we do what’s best for the user. We choose technology in service of adding value to the world, not in service of the technology. We don’t do things because a new infrastructure component exists.
Is a player somehow served by downloading a sprite-sheet from an Arweave node they themselves host? Unlikely. That’s not even tangentially interesting.
However, it’s clear that there are actually a few tangible benefits to the user, a few problems actually solved (not invented) by leveraging bits of Web3 tech. Those are the pieces we choose to use.
We’ll always pick what most benefits the user and isn’t just a shiny new thing.
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