Announcing Zytron Pioneer: The Most Performant Layer3 For ZK-powered Games
The Candy Crush moment for on-chain games is here.
We’re thrilled to announce that Zytron’s pioneer implementation, a Layer 3 Network on Linea, has entered pre-mainnet stage. This marks the first practical environment for zk-powered gaming, offering game developers unparalleled tools and resources for decentralized, high-performance applications.
What We’re Unveiling:
Zytron Kit: cryptographic primitives for highly-parallel co-processing
Key partners: a collective effort towards full “blockchain” abstraction for Dev-X
Incentivized campaigns: experience 30+ “interface-agnostic” games with mining rewards
Our Shoshin: build “Truly Decentralized Ownership”, not “Pseudo-decentralized Ownership”
Zytron is designed for native Zero Gas and millisecond-level proof verification, making it faster and cheaper than Ethereum Mainnet and L2s for many algorithms through pre-compiles. A prime example is the native support for EdOnBN254 (BabyJubJub) for faster verification of PlonK used in on-chain shuffling, meeting the high-responsiveness demands of gaming.
Zytron Kit Framework
…Yet another (vanilla) Layer3 network?
Zytron is a highly customizable zk game deployment environment, natively supporting Zypher’s blockchain abstraction layer for games. It is designed for production level gaming experiences, from autonomous worlds to TON-based hyper casual games.
Zypher introduces a new paradigm for high-performance on-chain applications, leveraging highly-parallel zk co-processing to achieve production-level scalability. Starting with gaming—one of the most widely adopted use cases—Zytron Pioneer enables game data to be processed by a decentralized network of servers and miners, replacing the centralized servers traditionally used in gaming and Web 2.5.
Why in the form of Layer3? Chains are scaling to Layer 3 using roll-up frameworks, e.g. Orbit or OP Stack, for cost efficiency, customization, lower threshold, dedicated blockspace, etc. Compared to standard roll-up frameworks, Zytron goes beyond smart-contract-level optimizations like zero gas, wallet abstraction, and chain abstraction. It is also equipped with a series of precompiled contracts and cryptographic primitives to support zk-powered games, as detailed in our whitepaper. And most importantly, the Zypher Mining program, the core of the decentralized Zypher in-game asset protocol, is nested on Zytron.
For developers, we’ve abstracted away the complex mathematics and cryptography in #ZK systems, allowing game developers to focus on building games, enabling COCOs / Unity based frontend to easily deploy with Zypher SDKs. With Zypher SDKs, game developers can “build a ZK game as easily as forking a Uniswap,” democratizing composable, verifiable, and provably fair gameplay for the majority.
Zypher’s stack is highly modular, consisting of 3 permissionless components, i) circuit market (ZK SDKs), ii) proof market, iii) verification contract.During each game, multiple zk proofs are generated to verify players’ data validity. Proof generation is outsourced to the proof network, ensuring high quality gameplay and being standardized with mining incentives.
Some Number Crunchings
Ethereum was not originally designed around ZK-friendliness, so there are many parts of the Ethereum protocol that take a large amount of computation to ZK-prove.
-The different types of ZK-EVMs
Zytron provides superior ZK processing compared to Layer 2 Solutions: 10X faster and 200X cheaper in gas cost. Precompiled contracts offer more advanced functions, especially for handling resource-intensive operations. Precompiling operations like elliptic curve point addition, scalar multiplication, and pairing is crucial for efficient and secure on-chain zkSNARK verification.
Performance Optimization: Precompiled contracts are often highly optimized in the underlying code and tightly integrated with the blockchain itself. This significantly enhances computations, such as cryptographic operations, making them very suitable for zkSNARK-based applications.
Reduced Gas Costs: Using precompiled contracts significantly lowers gas fees. For example, using a native Babyjubjub contract to verify a shuffle (cite) reveal proof costs as much as 7,629,888 gas.
Increased Transaction Speed: The gas limit per Ethereum block is 30 million. Since zkSNARK-based on-chain verification consumes a lot of gas, using precompiled contracts can effectively reduce this overhead, allowing more transactions to be processed per block. For instance, using the native Babyjubjub contract, a block can only accommodate three revel proofs, whereas using a precompiled contract, it can accommodate much more.
Time Savings in Development: With precompiled contracts, developers do not need to write complex cryptographic operations or deploy and compile their own contract versions, greatly improving development efficiency.
Security: The only precompiled elliptic curve in Ethereum is altbn128, which offers a security level of only 100 to 110 bits (https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/snark-security-and-performance/). Therefore, we can provide a more secure, SNARK-friendly elliptic curve.
Zytron Pioneer (Linea Layer 3) and Zero Gas Eligibility
Zytron Pioneer (dev docs) is Zytron’s first pre-mainnet environment on Linea Layer3, designed for a frictionless and seamless onboarding experience.
Zero Gas SBT: The real question is - why should an average gamer even know about “gas”? Web2 gamers are not reminded of server processing cost with every click. Everytime you ask a user to click you lose half of them. Zytron’s zero-gas module allows any gamers to acquire a gasless license (SBT token) through our campaigns for a frictionless experience.
Telegram Interfaces: Besides web pages, our games also support TMA (Telegram Mini App) interfaces to supercharge user acquisition through hyper-casual, sticky gameplays combined with web3-native financialization mechanisms. Native TON integration enables gamers to log-in with their Telegram account and manage in-game assets with TON wallets.
For network configuration, visit our docs here, or join our community for more details.
After the pre-mainnet goes live, we’ll launch a point system to identify early adopters and community contributors, featuring a series of task-oriented campaigns highlighting our launch partners like Linea and another 10-30 games, with rewards including points, in-game assets, $ETH-backed assets, and more.
Key Partners for Launch
Full blockchain abstraction comes from modularity. Our partners have been instrumental in building the modular infrastructure that makes Zytron possible.
General Layer 3 Infrastructure: Modularity is both an indicator and a driving force behind the industry's maturation.
Linea
A long-term supporter of Zypher’s ecosystem. Our past playtests on Linea have attracted over 1 million participants, generating millions of transactions. We also launched the first game on Linea’s Day One Mainnet. More details on the campaign with Linea will be announced shortly.
Risc Zero
We’re very proud to be an official gaming partner of Risc Zero, fully integrated with its ZKVM to provide game developers with easy access to build ZK games using preferred programming languages. We look forward to on-boarding more users with casual games running on its ZKVM and Bonsai cloud prover, the most practical & lightweight approach towards mass adoption for zk.
Gevulot
As a grantee and long-term partner of Gevulot, we enable computation-heavy proof generation to be out-sourced to Gevulot for free. The guarantee of fast and no-cost proof computation can enhance smooth gameplay as seamlessly as handled in centralized ways.
HyperLane
Hyperlane is the open interoperability framework that connects Zytron Pioneer to 40+ other ecosystems and seamlessly interoperates with EtherSafe, making Zypher's ZK-driven gaming experience even more chain-agnostic, enabling full interoperability in autonomous worlds! Supported chains and assets will be listed on our docs shortly.
Third Web
We’ve integrated our dev toolkits with Thirdweb to enable an easy on-boarding process for game developers, e.g. fully on-chain shuffling SDK and Trading Card Game templates. Developers can also easily access standard EVM tools on Zytron like Connect SDK and RPC Edge.
Particle Network
Particle is deploying its Waas (Wallet-as-a-Service) on Zytron Pioneer to extend its wallet abstraction and chain abstraction for game developers, enabling one-click onboarding into smart accounts through social logins for game developers.
Celestia
By posting data on an alternative DA layer, we’re lowering the hosting cost of the Layer 3 by xxx for better cost-effectiveness and focus on our core products. Beyond transactional data, we’re also posting and storing all the zk proofs generated during games. Since most of the supported games don’t have centralized servers, posting data on decentralized DA guarantees true decentralization since any community member can MOD the game in the way they want.
Renzo
As recently highlighted in Linea’s blog, Zypher supports DeFi-level composability for on-chain gaming, enabling seamless integration of DeFi mechanisms like re-staking. Zytron has integrated Renzo’s ezETH for liquidity bootstrapping, which is one of the largest assets on Linea.
Eigen Layer
Eigen Layer provides crypto-economics security for all kinds of on-chain protocols; we’ve integrated our AVS designed for cost-efficient proof verification. This has provided game developers with options for universal efficient proof verification beyond native precompiled support on Zytron.
The “Store Wars” Endgame
In 2014, a viral Reddit thread described a son who found his late dad’s “ghost” in a racing video game. The comments speculated that as long as the server wasn’t shut down, the dad’s account would always be there.
Now, we have the privilege and technical prerequisites to build a new paradigm of games without relying on centralized servers. Here’s a very good explanation of Fully On-chain Games by Will Robinson: a more “authentic” definition being putting everything on-chain (state, assets, etc.) and having the game logic in contracts. Yet the real goal is “trustlessness,” and by replacing that “trust” in centralized servers with “trust” in the blockchain, it often requires primitives like open-sourcing, contract-based economic systems, and community-based modding, leading to crypto-native designs like non-speculative, positive-sum financialization systems.
In The Strongest Crypto Gaming Thesis, Gubsheep mentioned one ethos for building “crypto-native games” as the game embracing real-world value digital assets. The definitions of “real-world” and “value” are both multi-faceted, and I’d like to take it further by stating that, compared to “on-chain applications,” gaming experiences have been part of people’s real-world lives for a much longer time. We’ve been talking about real digital ownership for gamers for a few years, and while there have been many great gaming projects embedding NFTs as assets, most asset policies are still centrally decided, which hasn’t made much impact since nothing has been fundamentally innovative. Under our new paradigm, verifiable game assets with truly decentralized ownership are only the first step, laying the foundation for a broader revolution in decentralized publishing, where game makers no longer rely on third-party publishers like Valve but can decentralize distribution models.