What I looked at in crypto this week

Some thoughts on rollups, onchain games and other assorted topics

I’m back!

Last week I went on a short trip with my family and was able to make use of the excessive air travel by taking a decent amount of notes. I’ll be going through these notes and cleaning them up into polished sentences as I write this, which will hopefully be helpful and/or entertaining to some of you. I last wrote about restaking and rollups-as-a-service, so today I’ll be doing a little bit more of the same and trying to stay on topic.

To start off, I discovered a very cool dashboard created by the Conduit team. Its name is rollup dot wtf (rollup.wtf) and displays a list of active rollups and their respective metrics (stuff like TPS and block count). Taking a look you’ll see the top three rollups by TPS are Arbitrum One, Base and ProofOfPlay, which wouldn’t be very surprising if I knew what ProofOfPlay was.

I searched it online only to find that ProofOfPlay is working on decentralized gaming infrastructure (I prefer the term onchain gaming) and has raised quite a bit of money. This is worth mentioning because I have a ton of notes covering the onchain gaming space that date back to last summer, many of which should get repurposed into a post of their own pretty soon.

Anyways, ProofOfPlay is some type of multi-chain base layer where games can deploy and utilize their scaling services, sort of like a regular L1 or L2 with games being analogous to apps. I’m always a little bit skeptical of chains that pigeonhole themselves into a specific vertical, only because there hasn’t been an example of a chain doing this and being successful yet. If your tech is so great, why not let everyone use it regardless of what apps they want to deploy?

There’s nothing wrong with being a blockchain built for a specific purpose, but I don’t think it’s smart to limit your growth in these early stages. Sure, we’re not as early into crypto as we were in 2013, or 2017, or even 2020, but we’re still very early in the grand scheme of things (I hate that phrase but it fits). If blockchains will eventually become ingrained with every aspect of our daily lives and the rest of humanity’s everyday tech stack, why not build for that and a little bit of everything on the side? Sorry if that sounds cynical, these are just my thoughts in a blog post that get spit out as they come to me.

ProofOfPlay is killing it with their performance metrics (I trust conduit for providing accurate data, if I’ve been led astray I apologize) and stands toe-to-toe with other L2s, so I don’t really agree with their approach. I’m also a bit skeptical as their chain or rollup or whatever it is doesn’t yet have any publicly available documentation. How did they achieve these numbers? I’m not quite sure. As far as the games go, they have one called Pirate Nation which seems interesting enough except I can’t get past the fact their token’s ticker is BOOTY. It’s tough enough as it is to get people to use crypto, let alone to play crypto games - telling someone they can earn BOOTY points isn’t a great sell, but maybe that’s just me.

ProofOfPlay is fetching about 16-17 TPS everytime I open up the site, so that’s pretty solid, which is almost 4x the rate of other rollups like Taiko, Scroll, Linea and Mode. I find it pretty disheartening that a purpose-built gaming chain that’s essentially a BOOTY points wrapper is outperforming Crypto Twitter’s favorite academic chains, but it is what it is.

There’s nothing wrong with low TPS, though, and I probably shouldn’t come across so negative when I write stuff like this. TPS was a massive selling point in 2021. Today, it’s more of an afterthought as it’s generally assumed your chain can move decently fast and perform its basic functions when needed. Most new L1s or L2s don’t advertise themselves as highly performant chains anyways, most of that is seen with execution layers or other niche modular infrastructure that eventually gets added into a chain after it’s been made.

The conduit dashboard is cool to me because it’s pretty much the only realtime database for rollup performance stats. Going back to what I just said, TPS is kind of a vanity metric (in my opinion) as most of us in crypto don’t feel the need to ooh and ahh at +0.5 TPS every time a new rollup comes out. The dashboard also shows you MGas/s (MegaGas per second) and KB/s (KiloBytes per second, duh) which tell you the amount of computational work being done and how data intensive rollups are, respectively.

Believe it or not, ProofOfPlay has over 2x MGas/s and is top three in KB/s, which tells me it’s working pretty hard. I’m not sure if this is because people aren’t using ProofOfPlay and farming BOOTY or if it’s a genuinely impressive rollup - there isn’t any documentation to let me know. Last week I briefly touched on TVL being a non-indicator for rollup success, mostly evident through Base’s dominance as a cultural phenomenon when compared to other rollups with greater TVL, like Blast. I think TPS is similar and could also be viewed as a non-indicator here, mostly because I struggle to see how something like ProofOfPlay competes with the marketing from Optimism, Base and Blast. Maybe they’ll be able to leverage their team’s impressive backgrounds to create some genuinely enjoyable onchain games, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

Moving beyond ProofOfPlay, this has reaffirmed my suspicions that Arbitrum is silently killing it. Aside from their absolutely absurd $250 million gaming proposal (lol), Arbitrum One is putting up a healthy ~35 TPS and doing a lot of computations based on what this dashboard tells us. I’ve been loosely following developments around Arbitrum Orbit chains and Stylus, but maybe this is the sign I’ve been needing to dig in and see what all the fuss is about.

Out of all of these rollups, Arbitrum One seems like the best fit to pursue games, only because it’s the fastest. Even then, it’s still not fast enough. AllianceDAO wrote a good post back in 2022 about throughput requirements for onchain games - here’s a link. The TLDR is that video games outside of the crypto industry (think: real video games) are much more capable due to a lack of design constraint. Crypto games are obviously built on blockchains, which are pretty good at a lot of things, but are not yet great for gaming. Here’s a snippet of the post that sums it up:

“Assuming a successful game has 20,000 concurrent users who change the game state every two seconds, on-chain games become woefully constrained. No blockchain can support those requirements. To play games on chain, we need to rethink their design. The tail must wag the dog.”

Even with Arbitrum One’s ~35+ TPS, it can’t offer the same experience of Eve Online, Fortnite or Grand Theft Auto 5. But that’s okay.

I don’t think anyone rational is claiming every single game needs to be ported onto blockchains, as that’s a pipe dream and also a tad unnecessary. The vast majority of games don’t need in-game economies, despite the numerous benefits blockchains might offer to siloed, centralized marketplaces (think: Counter Strike skins, Fortnite skins, in-app purchases).

There’s a massive (and constantly growing) number of amazing developers and teams building out heartfelt onchain games. Take a look at the Autonomous Worlds community or teams like Curio, Lattice and Argus; everything they do is out of a love for blockchains and gaming, unlike the numerous scam games that infiltrate non-crypto individuals’ YouTube feeds.

I remember a month or so back there was a huge uproar on Reddit (no surprise there) when a popular Hearthstone player endorsed Parallel. Everyone jumped all over him and the crypto community for even suggesting that owning your assets (and essentially your time) is superior to flushing your money into siloed marketplaces with no transferability or ownership. I haven’t watched the entire video yet but scroll through the comments, it’s pretty interesting to see these are consensus opinions around crypto in 2024.

Most of the uploader’s critiques devolve into basic complaints around the game’s design, small grievances over crypto that get amplified into manufactured uproar and accompanied by a lack of an open mind. It’s very easy for these people to farm their viewers by painting a picture of crypto being harmful and feeding into their confirmation bias.

Of course these people don’t like crypto, all they know is FTX and weird YouTubers trashing on anything that Reddit doesn’t like. I have plans to write an even longer report on this, so I’ll try to get back on whatever topic I was on before I went down this rabbit hole.

The TLDR is onchain games are good experiments, but sometimes bad ones from bad actors get funded with too much VC money. There are so many examples of quality games that come from honest developers - just look to frenpet’s journey as an example of what blockchains can unlock for niche game experiences.

I really did get off topic, so I’ll try and reel it back in. I won’t write too much more as I plan to post frequently from here on out and it’d be best not to burn out on any of these topics. Like I said earlier, there is a huge amount of writing on my laptop that could make for a killer onchain gaming report. It’s a bit out of date but would ideally resemble something like this and provide closer analysis on some of the cooler games/designs I’ve seen so far.

Anyways, hopefully this was enjoyable to you guys and gives a better view into my brain. It’s much easier for me to do this than it is to take notes, so I’ll try my best to keep it up. Talk to you all later.