StarkWare Sessions #8 | Cartridge Starknet Gaming with Tarrence

Sometimes, the frontier is at a crypto conference. We’re returning from our adventures in Tel Aviv with nine exclusive interviews with some of the key players in the StarkNet space. Wish you could make it to all the crypto conferences, but don't have the time? Don't worry, Bankless brings the frontier to you. Cartridge is building out the legos necessary to produce a robust gaming ecosystem in Starknet. With the compression capabilities of zk technology, the possibilities for game logic is astounding. Gaming infrastructure is a key building block of the metaverse, and Cartridge is helping us get there. ------ 📣 MetaMask Learn https://bankless.cc/metamaskshow ------ 🚀 JOIN THE NATION: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/subscribe ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🐙KRAKEN | MOST-TRUSTED CRYPTO EXCHANGE https://bankless.cc/kraken 🦄UNISWAP | ON-CHAIN MARKETPLACE https://bankless.cc/uniswap ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🚁 EARNIFI | CLAIM YOUR UNCLAIMED AIRDROPS https://bankless.cc/earnifi 👻 PHANTOM | CROSS-CHAIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/phantom ------ Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 4:00 Getting Starked 7:55 zk-Rollup 9:30 On-Chain Gaming 13:00 What’s Possible? 16:30 Downstream Effects 18:30 Owning Valuable Assets 22:45 The Stack 27:00 Cartridge 30:42 Starknet is a Game 33:30 Get Involved ----- Resources: Tarrence https://twitter.com/tarrenceva Cartridge https://twitter.com/cartridge_gg StarkNet https://starkware.co/starknet/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. And sometimes, that frontier is at a conference. Like last weekend, where over a thousand developers, founders, builders, and investors attended the Starkware Sessions in Tel Aviv in order to participate in growing the Starknet ecosystem. This is Bankless's Starkware Sessions series, which are nine bite-sized episodes interviewing the founders, builders, and ecosystem developers of Starknet. Every once in a while, in the crypto world, a conference happens, but not everyone is available to attend. Don't worry, Bankless has your back, because I go to basically every conference that's out on the frontier, and I bring an entire podcast studio in tow with me, in order to make sure that the Bankless Nation stays on the frontier of what's happening in crypto.

• 0:45David Hoffman?

  In this interview, we are talking to Cartridge. Cartridge is building out all of the Legos that is needed to produce on-chain gaming in the Starknet world. We of course know what Web3 gaming is. Web3 gaming is like gaming with assets. You have games, but now you also have assets in your game. It's different in the world of Starknet, because we have the compression technologies of ZK rollups, of ZK tech. We can do much, much more than just assets in our game. We can put much more of our game logic on-chain. Perhaps smart contracts on Ethereum are for putting business and finance logic. Well, since we have so much more compression power on ZK rollups, we can put more game logic on-chain and have that actually be viable, due to how much compression is in the world

• 1:30David Hoffman?

  of ZK rollups. And so Cartridge got started trying to build an on-chain game, and then they realized that first, we need to build all this normal game infrastructure that other games are also going to have to do if they also build on Starknet. So first, we have to build the tools, the player databases, you know, the player profiles, all this kind of stuff. And then, it can incur a blossoming of more and more and more on-chain games on Starknet. So that's the pitch. We're going to go into more of these details, and so much more. So let your imaginations run wild. But first, I wanted to talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Kraken has been around for almost as long as crypto itself. As crazy as crypto is, Kraken has remained a rock for its clients, building out a platform designed to stand the test of time.

• 2:13David Hoffman?

  Kraken is all about proof, not promises, which is why they've pioneered a proof of reserves, a system that lets Kraken's customers verify for themselves the solvency and responsibility of the Kraken exchange. And for this reason, and many more, we've chosen Kraken as Bankless's strategic sponsor for 2023. And once you're done using Kraken to get your dirty fiat money into pristine crypto assets, perhaps you should check out Arbitrum, where so much of the frontier of crypto innovation is taking place. Arbitrum just announced their Stylus initiative, which is their brand-new programming environment that lets developers deploy apps using their favorite programming languages like Rust, C, C++ alongside regular old solidity EVM apps. Thets can use any coding language they like, and it simultaneously drops Layer 2 fees by an order of magnitude. It's a big deal.

• 2:57David Hoffman?

  So many of your favorite DeFi apps have already deployed to Arbitrum, like Uniswap. But did you know that Uniswap isn't just for ERC20 tokens anymore? Uniswap is also an NFT aggregator too, to make sure that you are getting the best price on your NFC purchases. Uniswap gives NFT collectors and traders powerful tools all from the cozy, comfy Uniswap interface. By the way, it's also got a native fiat on-ramp. It's also deployed on like every Layer 2, and it's got this nifty cool thing called a universal router that ensures that you always get the best price on your trades. Crypto protocols like Arbitrum and Uniswap are becoming super powerful, so make sure that you're also using a wallet that's equally as powerful, or else you'll be missing out. If you're looking to upgrade your wallet experience, check out Phantom, the number one wallet of Solana, which has recently come to both Ethereum and Polygon. Phantom has native NFT support,

• 3:42David Hoffman?

  giving you your own NFT gallery from inside the wallet. Phantom is both a browser extension and a mobile wallet, and is also the only wallet to span both the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems. Check it out at phantom.app. And now, let's get into the interview. Bankless Nation, we are back at the Starkware Sessions in Tel Aviv, Israel. And I am here with Terrence, who's gonna walk us through the world of Starknet gaming. Starknet gaming, excuse me. Terrence, tell us, how did you arrive on Starknet? What brought you here?

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. Thank you for having me. So my journey on Starknet started about, I would say, November 2021. We had recently launched the DOP Wars project, which was based on Loot, and was an on-chain gaming ecosystem with a DAO associated with it. And as part of the secondary royalties, bootstrapped a DAO that was governed by the players that have minted this free-to-mint NFT. And we started a grant fund where we would just grant people, like the DAO would choose to grant people building on interesting things, contributing to the DOP Wars universe. And someone came to the DAO with this idea to rebuild this game called Drug Wars, which is what DOP Wars was based on, fully on-chain on top of Starknet. And this is very early on in the Starknet kind of like iteration cycles,

• 4:55Speaker 01

  right before Starknet even had a mainnet available. And we built out a fully on-chain game that was very early on, and kind of opened my eyes to what was possible, this idea of putting like everything on-chain, not just, you know, the assets, but all of the rules and the properties and everything that governs like the loop of this game. And so that's what really brought me to Starknet and was the beginning of the journey that has brought me today to building Cartridge and helping out the ecosystem of on-chain gaming on Starknet Evolve.

• 5:32David Hoffman?

  I definitely want to really just dive headfirst into the world of on-chain gaming and how that's different from what people might be used to when they hear like Web 3 gaming. But first, the fact that this got started off of the Loot project, I think, is really interesting.

• 5:46Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:46David Hoffman?

  Because this is actually the second gaming community that I've heard come out of Loot. The first one being Magic. But the Magic ecosystem came out of, again, like that whole Loot phenomenon. But that went to Arbitrum. Why did you and why did others come to Starknet? Like, what about Starknet has really attracted you?

• 6:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so actually, so we originally, a lot of the DOPORZ ecosystem is actually on optimism. So we built out, very early on in the optimism ecosystem, we built on fully on-chain rendered NFTs to represent, like, in DOPORZ you have a Hustler, which is your item, and then all the items that you got, like, on the original card were bridged to optimism as individual items. So you get like your gun, or your, you know, like, your Air Force Ones, or your gold chain, and stuff like that. And you can, like, assemble them onto your character, onto your Hustler, and those are all stored and rendered on-chain. So that was, you know, an early experiment of having a fully on-chain NFTs that are, like, interoperable and composable.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And people can kind of, like, play this game of equipping, like, the DOPORZ Hustler. So we were kind of open to, I mean, it was very apparent early on that you can't build, especially, you know, during the bull market of, like, you know, like, late 21, whatever, where Ethereum gas prices were, like, north of 100 guai. You can't really build a game on-chain and expect people to interact with it. So we were very, you know, eager to explore different options. So we started with optimism and then started building out, and optimism was, you know, much more production-ready at that moment in time, and then started building out on Starknet.

• 7:23Speaker 01

  I think with Starknet, it's really, there's a set of constraints that it loosens versus, like, EVM chains. Like, one is around, like, the complexity of the smart contracts that can get, like, a little bit tricky to deal with when writing solidity. And the other is this idea of, like, fractal scaling and exponential availability of compute that you can put on-chain, which I think, like, makes Starknet particularly interesting for building games on, as well as some other properties, like account abstraction, that, you know, obviously everyone's very excited about.

• 7:54David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there's so many different ways to start this conversation. Account abstraction, definitely one of them for needing to have the necessary infrastructure to really onboard people into gaming. But I think that really, that big unlock is the ZK element that allows you just to do more. Can you talk about the ZK rollup and what it's allowed you to do when building on Starknet?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I think it really just allows you to have a lot more bandwidth for like expressing computation on chain with the future like potential avenues for exponentially increasing that through you know fractal scaling or client-side proving. So you even have you know properties of like private information that are easily incorporated into the StarkNet like blockchain by producing a proof on your client, you know, allowing for like hidden information and then putting that on chain, as well as different data availability solutions that are starting to come to market. So when you think about a game, there's obviously like a spectrum of assets that require different properties, right? And so as you want to put more and more of those games on-chain so that they

• 8:57Speaker 01

  like, you know, inherit the properties of the blockchain, like the hardness and the persistence and that they can be around forever, you want, you don't want to, you know, necessarily want to pay the same amount like per byte, for example, for you know, like a core item versus maybe like some illustration of an item or like a 3D model of an item. So I think like that's another very interesting avenue that ZK Rollups and StarkNet have been innovating in that is going to be like crucial to building fully on-chain games.

• 9:28David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so fully on-chain games. Can you compare and contrast these? What a fully on-chain game is versus what perhaps a more, what people might know as a web three game? How is this different?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think like baseline, they have some similarities, potentially. The web three games generally I would say are characterized by assets living on-chain and taking advantage of the capability of the blockchain for like player ownership of assets and the ability for people to trade them in secondary markets. So like opening up this idea that gamers should own their assets, they should be able to sell them, they should be able to like accumulate them over time, potentially by like playing the game and potentially get paid for the game, right? There's like people working on different dynamics and like, I mean, I would say, you know, differing degrees of success, obviously, what we've seen from like, you know, play to earn and stuff like that.

• 10:24Speaker 01

  So I think like, you know, that's like the first, just scratching the surface of the properties that a blockchain brings to the table that makes sense for games. On-chain games, you start to see like a lot more of that logic start to live on-chain. So, you know, with Web 3 games, you're still reliant on this promise that there's some off-chain game that's going to implement these assets, it's going to make them useful, and that like your assets are going to derive value from, right? Whereas on-chain game, we start to put all that logic on-chain, like incrementally and like eventually, potentially, everything, right? So the rules that, the properties of those assets, or those items, like I don't even really like to call them assets because it like, you know, it's a very financialized term. Like when you think, I start thinking about like a whole gaming ecosystem being on-chain,

• 11:09Speaker 01

  there's really a ton of different like objects that exist or in this universe and maybe-

• 11:14David Hoffman?

  Anything in your gaming inventory.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, and some of them might be tradable, some of them might not, some of them might be issued by the ecosystem. Um, so yeah, all of those things, or even the properties of a boss, right? Like what is, you know, the class of the boss and stuff? Like all of these kind of things start to live on-chain, they're legible by smart contracts, and people can start to make assumptions about this foundation that it's not going to go away beneath them, right? Like, so in traditional gaming, even in Web 3 gaming, um, it's hard to build a game on top of another game, right? We've seen it like many times over with, with franchises like Warcraft or GTA, where a developer builds like a ecosystem alongside that maybe like takes advantage of like some

• 11:57Speaker 01

  game and mods it in a certain sense, but it's very hard for them to turn that into like a sustainable business model because you're kind of, you know, always at the whims of the original IP owner. So you, like if you become too popular, like, you know, then probably lawyers get involved and like you, maybe you'll figure out like an exit strategy or like some kind of acquisition. But it's very hard, for example, for like an investor to, or even a person to invest a lot of time into building something that they think they can last on top of like a fragile foundation, you know? It's like a similar property that you get when you build on top of Twitter and then like all of a sudden they, they close the APIs off, right? And so with unchained games, you get to have a foundation that you can make assumptions about and you can start to build in that that universe can compound, right?

• 12:42Speaker 01

  So I think like those are, that's like the big contrast of the properties that the blockchain gives to unchained games that I think are gonna, you know, over time, it's a very emergent, like very early on in the ecosystem, but over time, because the efforts were compound, we're gonna see like incredibly vibrant, like, you know, massive ecosystems of these parallel, like, unchained universes that anyone can contribute to and monetize and be compensated for expanding.

• 13:11David Hoffman?

  And so, just to reiterate what you said, like, we have Web3 games, which is really just about the instantiation of in-game assets as tokens. But the game itself is rendered and not really, it's like, the game itself is just like a normal Web2 game, it's a trad game.

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:28David Hoffman?

  And so what we're talking about, and specifically the magic of ZK rollups and why we're here at Starknet, is because you, because of what a ZK rollup is, you actually can do more things, as in, what ZK rollups were trying to do is just reduce the cost of computation down to their absolute minimum.

• 13:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:45David Hoffman?

  And when you can reduce, when you do reduce the cost of computation, all of a sudden, what is viable to put on-chain actually increases.

• 13:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 13:53David Hoffman?

  So have you thought about, after assets, what goes on-chain after, like, now that we have much more commoditized computational costs? What can go on-chain next? What makes sense to put on-chain?

• 14:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think we're seeing a bunch of different experimentation with this. Like I mentioned, the Dope Boys ecosystem, we experimented with fully on-chain NFTs and rendering, and there's a few projects, obviously, doing that on Ethereum as well. On Starknet, we're starting to see fully on-chain games, like Mumu by Topology, which is, they've built a fully on-chain physics engine that deals with processes and is basically like a very fun but technical game, where you set up different state machines to kind of achieve this objective. You should check it out if you haven't, Mumu by Topology. There's another game, like Influence, which is a space exploration game, which is

• 14:43Speaker 01

  A lot of fun and that game as well like has some NFT assets that they issued initially that are incorporated into the game. They're crewmates and asteroids and then they've built out this like very immersive experience on chain, fully on chain of how you explore this universe, how you travel through the universe, how you can, you know, land on an asteroid and start to mine resources from the asteroid and, and build like a civilization and, and you know, it's a very we, they recently did a testing event with a bunch of like, you know, a few thousand players and everyone was fully on chain on Starknet and playing this game and, and it, it starts to create like these interesting behaviors where, you know,

• 15:23Speaker 01

  one of the cool things was people started building civilizations on these asteroids or like, or machinery on these asteroids to kind of like make a picture, right? And because it's on the blockchain, it's almost like, okay, now the game itself is like, you know, like an NFT in a sense, right? Uh, which is like a cool, like, uh, emergent behavior. And then you have the, the realms team, obviously, building a few different games on, on Starknet and pushing the barriers of what's possible there. Uh, and that too is a fully on-chain game where all of the rules that govern your realms and how you like can, you know, build armies and the resource management and all these kinds of things is all on-chain. So, you know, I think the next thing that makes a lot of sense to experiment with in the, in the Starknet ecosystem is

• 16:08Speaker 01

  the rules and the logic. There's not so much experimentation about putting like the assets, like media and stuff, fully on-chain just yet. Uh, I think that maybe it will come with different data availability solutions as, as those are rolled out. Um, but yeah, it's very, a lot of experimentation around like just the core logic that governs why an asset like makes sense for this ecosystem.

• 16:30David Hoffman?

  And you touched on it, but I really wanted to drive this point home that, so I want to talk about it a little bit more. What do we get when we put more of our games on chain? Like there's this vision of, of crypto gaming as like composable games where your items can transcend across games or your character can transcend across games, like game composability. When we put more and more of our game on chain, whatever that logic may be, what, what kind of properties do we get out as a, as a result of that?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think it's like you described, interoperability and composability are two big value propositions. We've yet to achieve a great deal of that. I think a lot of that will come through some standardization in how games are built and represented on-chain. And so, we have an effort that we're working on with the Starknet community called Dojo to build out an on-chain gaming tool chain, like for developing smart games on top of Starknet. And that, I think, has the capability to standardize a lot of those primitives and allow for interoperability and composability much more easily. You get the hardness of the blockchain, so the guarantees that the things on it are going to exist as long as the blockchain will exist, right? And the blockchain gives you this property where

• 17:42Speaker 01

  anyone can propagate the blockchain at some point in the future, right? Like if someone, if no one is mining Bitcoin and you want Bitcoin to continue, you just mine it yourself, right? And the chain will continue propagating. So you can get that same property for a gaming universe, right? Today, you might have a centralized publisher, you know, like the longest living games are like Warcraft, like franchises and Blizzard and stuff like that. But at some point Blizzard's going to shut down the World of Warcraft servers or something, right? And if you, your options are kind of limited, especially now that servers, servers weren't designed to be run by anyone, right? Like, in theory, they could like open source it and you would need probably like a DevOps team to like figure

• 18:26Speaker 01

  out like how to stand this stuff all up. Whereas like blockchain games are inherently designed to be replicated, for it to be like robust to this, that anyone can continue propagating this universe if they're interested in it.

• 18:38David Hoffman?

  I want to unpack that metaphor a little bit and dive into that. So I've used Hearthstone, which is another Blizzard game, which is much like Magic the Gathering for people that are familiar with that. Same kind of game. You own cards and then you play them and like there's the, and this is a server base. And so, unlike Magic the Gathering, which is played in person, Hearthstone is played virtually. Similar to Magic the Gathering, you buy cards. You buy cards from Blizzard and then those go into your inventory and then you battle other people. The problem with Hearthstone and what was actually nice about Magic the Gathering is that when you buy the cards, you actually own them in Magic the Gathering. In Hearthstone, when you buy the cards, it's just a database log.

• 19:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:22David Hoffman?

  And so if we want to go through this progression in Web 3, the first phase of Web 3 gaming is like, well, no, now you own your assets. And so like when you actually buy, Gods Unchained is now this Web 3 version of Hearthstone.

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:36David Hoffman?

  Where you actually own the tokens as cards. And so then you can play the game, but you actually own the cards. The issue with that, though, is that there's still a server, there's still a client that is needed to be maintained in order to play the game. So if the company behind Gods Unchained goes down, you can't play the game anymore.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:54David Hoffman?

  So it's great that you own your assets, but you also need to own the game too.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:59David Hoffman?

  Or otherwise, like the game itself will be rugged and all the reasons why you own the assets in the first place, the utility just drops to zero.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  I think it's a great comparison. I think like really what you can say is like, a lot of the properties that Magic the Gathering has by being like a physical item in the real world can now be given to digital games that live on the blockchain, right? Like if you have a deck in Magic the Gathering, you can play it no matter what. No one can stop you, right? Like as long as you have a deck of cards, you can play it with whoever you want.

• 20:28David Hoffman?

  But you're also limited by the physical constraints of the real world.

• 20:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, you are. So that you don't have like, you know, like...

• 20:34David Hoffman?

  RNG or you can't play over the internet and stuff like that.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Well, you could roll a dice, but, you know, but, um, but yeah. And like the creator of the game, I mean, like from my understanding, I'm not big into Magic the Gathering, but there's like a formalized, um, like tournaments and stuff like that where they have stricter rules around like cards that are allowed and interpretations of them. But if you don't agree with that in Magic the Gathering, if you have the deck and you're just playing with your friend, you can make whatever rules up you want, right? And I think like that property, it doesn't exist in digital games, right? Like for example, if you're like playing, like let's say League of Legends or Hearthstone or whatever, and Blizzard or Riot decides to like nerf a card,

• 21:17Speaker 01

  there's no way for you to opt out of that nerf to say like, well, I'm gonna play with my friends and we like that card. But like with the blockchain, with the game that exists on the blockchain, you have that optionality. Like you not only have this ability for players to be involved in that decision-making, to like potentially nerf an item, which I think like will provide a lot of legitimacy. In a lot of gaming ecosystems, there's this idea of like this top-down, like decisions coming and nerfing things that like people get generally quite upset about. And with the blockchain, you enable like this bottom-up, like if every, all the players agree, this is out of balance, then like let's balance it. And you also have this ability for like optionality, right? Like you can constrain the games in certain,

• 22:01Speaker 01

  like in a certain mode, while still allowing like other modes to exist in parallel. Or like other people to build different experiences that are slightly different. Like if you, you know, if, if, if there's a game of, built on top of like the digital version of Hearthstone, like a fully on-chain game, like there might be someone that says like, look, like the games, I think it could be better balanced like this, and maybe we introduce these cards. And they're free to like, you know, inherit like a lot of that, like the foundation of the original game, and provide a new experience that's better on top of it, without this like, you know, this worry that if you are competing with this original game, that like there's like gonna be some adverse consequence in the future.

• 22:45David Hoffman?

  Okay, so I can, I'm pretty good at daydreaming. I'm pretty good at imagining things. I can imagine some sort of like MMORPG that's as fully on-chain as possible, and there's hundreds of thousands of people, and they're all playing, and it's all super fun. But first, we're at Starknet. What we got is Starknet. There's also this thing called Cartridge. But help us go from Starknet to 100,000 people playing this MMORPG. We don't just get to skip there. What are the necessary steps in order to get to that point? Like what are the base level infrastructure we need to enable something like that?

• 23:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think, yeah, we're decently far away from that. I think like... I think there's a tractable path to achieving it. I think like one of the biggest gaps in the short term is just like standardization around like how games are represented on chain and building out tool chains that enables people to more easily build games on top of Starknet in particular. And that's like, you know, like, like taking learnings from the existing gaming industry, like there's, you know, like standardized ways of representing games and patterns and architectures that people have used for a long time and have like a lot of inertia and that we can build on top of the blockchain. So there's something called like entity component systems, which is, you know, a lot of game engines

• 24:04Speaker 01

  use this to represent like what the state in a world and the state transitions of that world. And so that's something that we're building with Dojo is a fully on-chain, a tool chain for building fully on-chain games that abstracts a lot of the semantics of like the smart contracts and all this stuff underneath and allows people to like very concisely and easily build games on top of Starknet and take advantage of those properties without necessarily having to be exposed to like, you know, the rabbit hole that's usually necessary to understand like smart contract state model and stuff like this. So just making it much more accessible. So I think that's like, you know, one of the first steps to enabling this. I think like, you know, once we have compelling games on top of Starknet,

• 24:48Speaker 01

  you know, Starknet itself is not, is an exponential increase in compute available on top of Ethereum, but itself could not manage the throughput necessary for a single like very well adopted game. And a lot of the constraints that Starknet is optimized around is around like security and more like DeFi use cases. So I think like a logical next thing is layer threes or like executing on the fractal scaling roadmap. So that's like layer three solutions that have properties that are more tuned to what a game needs. So, you know, like in DeFi or in Starknet, you probably want like decentralized sequencers, right? Because like, you know, you're, you're touching financialized assets and there's a lot of,

• 25:31Speaker 01

  you know, the adversarial model is very different. For an on-chain game, you're probably okay with like a A centralized sequencer with high throughput that's checkpointing to Starknet. And there you can easily exit to come back down to Starknet if the sequencer is not propagating the world state in a way that the players want. So I think the next step is going to look like centralized sequencers, layer three sequences on top of Starknet, tailored towards specific gaming universes that are just checkpointing to Starknet. And then another dimension that I think is quite interesting is client-side proving.

• 26:12Speaker 01

  And so the ability to compute, like today you can do it actually in the Starknet ecosystem. There's provers that you can compile to WASM and run in your browser. There's a really exciting project called Sandstorm of someone working on this. And there's some standards coming out that's going to make it much more feasible to do in the browser as well computationally. And that gives you the property of hidden information as well as you can generate these proofs on the client side that are very easy to verify. So you get another layer of exponential growth of compute available. And so I think all of those things are probably going to have some kind of role in building

• 26:54Speaker 01

  this future fully on-chain game, massive multiplayer online game, as well as probably state channels and different data availability solutions. So really, we need to execute on the full roadmap to enable that future. It's like the abundance of compute and the full spectrum of trade-offs available for things that want to live on the blockchain.

• 27:18David Hoffman?

  So you said the word standard a lot. And going back, I kind of see this world of on-chain gaming following the same footsteps of DeFi, which is on-chain finance. But DeFi didn't come about until we had the ERC 20 token standard. And then all of a sudden, applications could start to reason about the assets inside of them. And that standard uniformity of assets made it easy to have these assets be composable. Same thing with NFTs. We didn't have NFTs until we had the ERC 721 standard. And so there seems to be this... inevitable hurdle that must overcome before an ecosystem arrives, which is the standardization hurdle.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:56David Hoffman?

  Which I think that goes to what you're doing at Cartridge. Can you walk us through what Cartridge is and how the idea of standardization is so important?

• 28:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, so Cartridge's goal is to accelerate the advent of on-chain gaming. So we're working on, you know, dog fooding. We're developing a few games ourself and then solving a lot of the problems that we see in the ecosystem and working with the community to solve them. So initially, our focus has been on onboarding users. And we've built a solution called the Cartridge Controller, which deals with player interaction and identity and leverages something called WebAuthent to use like the secure enclave in your device to issue credentials and allow people to sign up for and start executing transactions on-chain, which is a single click, like a Face ID or a biometric finger scan. So that's like one of the things that we focused on like quite early on with Cartridge. Now with Cairo 1.0 maturing and the ability to like kind of start building up the stack

• 28:48Speaker 01

  for on-chain games, the tool chain, we're working with the ecosystem, with the different, the community of games, like the Realms team with Love and Silv at Brick and a bunch of other like talented contributors like Annie and a few others, on building the Dojo tool chain. And the Dojo tool chain is really this idea of standardizing the primitives that people are using on-chain to represent games. So it is an implementation of an ECS system. And it has like some cool properties of like verifiable client-side states and stuff like that that we've built into it. And it's already, the nice thing about ECS systems is it's already a standard in traditional gaming, like the traditional gaming development. And so it's not like we have to necessarily invent something new.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  We just need to build a way to represent like ECS systems on top of Starknet. And so that's what we're focusing on like in the short term. And I think like that level of standardization is going to bring, to your point, like the advent of, you know, powerful infrastructure built around it. So like, once we have a standardized ECS system or way of representing state for games and the processes and the functions that change that state over time, you can start to build powerful infrastructure that's like applies to all the games, right? And then if someone is building a game on Starknet, they get all these things for free. It's like if you issue a token on Ethereum, you obviously do it on a U C 20, so you can put it on Uniswap, right? It's like.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  You know, like the equivalent, I guess, like one, one way to think about it today is like the on-chain gaming ecosystem with NFTs today is like, NFTs are interoperable in a, in a financialized sense that they can trade with each other. But it's not like interoperable in the sense that like you could, the, the, the properties of them are legible on-chain and you can have functions and stuff like that. So just like surfacing that level of interoperability is gonna, and standardizing it is gonna enable this, I think, this future.

• 30:45David Hoffman?

  Continuing with the progression of DeFi as a mental model idea. I've always been a fan of the idea that like Uniswap is an individual DeFi app. And Compound is also an individual DeFi app, but these things also hook into each other. And they're also hooked into AVE. And actually, every single DeFi app that's on the same L1 is also really just one big structure. Cause they're all interoperated with each other. So like, instead of individual DeFi apps, there's actually just one big DeFi superstructure. And that's because of the composability of these systems.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 31:17David Hoffman?

  And I kind of think that's perhaps the way on-chain gaming also plays out. As in like, we have this one on-chain game and then we have a second on-chain game. But then there'll start to be like composability between these two things. And then a third on-chain game and this all of a sudden, this is actually not just individual on-chain games. But actually Starknet is the game. And it's actually many, many, many games. Did you share this vision?

• 31:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I, I think that meta, that like vision or metaphor expands just to life in general, in a sense, but. Yeah, I think like that is the meta game. I mean, right now we're in the meta game of building games, right? And on-chain games on Starknet and it's a lot of fun because it's a great ecosystem to be in. It's like everyone, there's so many people that do this for fun. You know, that I think that's like a, a common attribute of people involved in the Starknet ecosystem is they're here for like, like out of pure intellectual interest of like, what is really on the bleeding edge? And it's like a game and it's fun for them, right? But yeah, I think definitely, I think like similar, like I think similar to like the evolution of DeFi.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  On Ethereum, like the kind of the paradox, you know, like a lot of people will say, no, on-chain gaming is very early, but. The games that are built today and the things that are built today are probably because they have this property that they can like live on perpetually. The stuff that's built in the next few years probably has the highest chance of being like the next big thing, right? So while it's so early and like hard to figure out like what are the paths we should go down or like what should we invest in, like when getting the right formula is gonna be like, you know, like when Hayden was working on like constant product markets and everyone, like no one really like knew about them and then all of a sudden, you know, Uniswap is like the size of Coinbase, you know?

• 33:07Speaker 01

  So I feel like it's some, something similar will happen once we figure out something cool that players love, that people love to build on top of, that like it manages to attract a critical mass of people modding it and building new experiences and like building sustainable like business models on top of entertainment for players. I think like it's coming soon and yeah, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a lot of fun.

• 33:32David Hoffman?

  So if we've piqued the interest of any of the listeners listening to this, who do you need the most help from? Who could you get the most assistance from out of any of these listeners? What kind of developers, what kind of developers, who do you need help from?

• 33:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I think like the ecosystem could use with just a lot of experimentation and we're seeing it. There's like, you know, a lot of different pockets of people building different on-chain games and different experiences with different constraints, some on Ethereum mainnet, some on Polygon. I think it's like important for people to continue experimenting with those and for people that are interested in the space to try them out and like provide feedback and be a part of that feedback loop. I think like there's a large contingent of like the traditional gaming industry that is very hesitant on blockchain technology because of the financialized properties of it. But I think like there's a lot of properties that the blockchain can enable for games

• 34:30Speaker 01

  that any game developer would want. I mean, if you're building a game in like a traditional game, especially if it's a game that fits into the constraints of the blockchain, like something that's turn-based and has like shared state and potentially like adversarial models and stuff like that, like...

• 34:46Speaker 01

  It would be significantly easier to build a turn-based game as a developer on top of something like Starknet, once the infrastructure is solid, than to build out and manage that whole backend yourself, right? You get to start experimenting, like you get a lot more leverage being able to take advantage of all these other pieces, outside of the financialized component of things. So I think like, having, bringing those people that are familiar with traditional gaming, the industry and game development, into the blockchain space and getting them excited to take advantage of these properties outside of the financialized stuff, which you know, can leave a lot of sour taste in a lot of people's mouths. I think that is gonna be critical to building like, you know,

• 35:30Speaker 01

  like the future that you talked about of like, a massive like, AAA-quality MMORPG online game that's fully owned by the players and has these like, properties of composability and interoperability and actually just being like, something competitive with what a studio, like a centralized studio with a billion dollars can do today, yeah.

• 35:55David Hoffman?

  Well, Terrence, I hope we've piqued the interest of many, many, many Bankless listeners and made them optimistic about the future of on-chain gaming. So, thank you for helping me tell that story.

• 36:03Speaker 01

  Awesome, thanks for having me, yeah. And if anyone wants to chat about it or get involved in the ecosystem, feel free to reach out on Twitter or join the Discord and just find me around.

• 36:14David Hoffman?

  What's the website?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  cartrich.gg

• 36:17David Hoffman?

  Awesome, thank you, Terrence.

• 36:18Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 36:18David Hoffman?

  Cheers.