Adventure Gold originally emerged from the Loot NFT community as a fair launch token. In this manifesto, we walk through the problems we experience in the Loot & Fully Onchain Games space and our mission to provide the bespoke solution for Fully Onchain Games & Autonomous Worlds.
FOCG as a natural evolution for crypto native applications
Fully on-chain games (FOCG) represent the pinnacle of on-chain applications, embodying the principles of sovereign ownership, permissionless innovation, composability, and inevitable financialization. At their core, FOCGs offer players sovereignty of the world they explore, under which the context of how the items, assets and environments have interacted is liberated from centralized control. This sovereignty extends beyond mere possession, empowering players to influence the very fabric of the games they inhabit.
It is no small feat to bring fully onchain games a reality. Starting with Dark Forest and Loot, we have seen a gradual but slow process in the FOCG landscape. Games have been idealized, go onto testnet, and now some of them are already running on mainnet. However, adoption rate is still not ideal.
Adoption bottlenecks
Infrastructure is at best under-performing when it comes to hosting FOCGs. Especially in the world of EVM, the origin of both Dark Forest & Loot, it's hard to find an EVM chain providing enough blockspace at a fast enough block time. Here at Adventure Gold DAO, we launched the Loot Chain back in 2023. Loot Chain was an early effort where we tried to provide a cheap & scalable vanilla EVM environment for FOCGs in the Lootverse. Being one of the first L3s based on the OP stack, at the time cutting-edge technology, we had high hopes for the Loot Chain. It turns out there are more bottlenecks than we thought. It's not enough to simply run a L3 with high TPS. Much more has to be done to ensure hyper-scalability and a good UX. Beyond Loot Chain, we have also seen FOCG teams trying to deploy on other chains but didn't get a bearable result, such as Blast & Ton. We quickly realized that the requirements for FOCGs are very different compared to all the existing categories of onchain applications. It's time that we custom-made the infrastructures for FOCGs/AWs.
Beyond infrastructure, FOCG's growth limitation is compounded by a pervasive lack of clear objectives within the community. Efforts to simply migrate existing games to the blockchain, focus solely on creating enjoyable gameplay, or maximize composability have all yet yielded the desired results. Each approach, while noble in intent, has failed to address the nuanced demands of our user base. We have yet to get a wide enough recognition in the crypto space. Being the pinnacle of crypto native applications, the AGLD DAO believes FOCGs require community recognition to grow into a network effect. A growing user base should lead to a higher value proposition to users, which should lead to more attention driven into the space, consequently attracting more users. It has been several years since the launch of Dark Forest & Loot, the community hasn't grown exponentially, to say the least.
Our Mission
In the evolving landscape of fully onchain games, our mission is to unlock their true potential, beginning with the Lootverse. We strive to construct a robust infrastructure that allows these games to scale while maintaining sovereignty and composability. At the heart of this endeavor lies the cultivation of an ecosystem of “minimum viable economies”. Here, economics transforms into the new physics of the onchain world. Just as human existence is the culmination of millions of years of evolution, so must our ecosystem begin with the smallest, self-sustaining elements. Each component, no matter how minute, must function harmoniously to foster a thriving, interconnected world. This foundational approach will pave the way for a vibrant, autonomous gaming ecosystem.
Minimum Viable Economy
The Loot NFT inspired multiple series of NFTs where each NFT is a packet of multiple items. The utility of the Loot NFT is supposedly constituted as a subset of the sum of the utility of each item. Throughout the past three years, we have seen numerous endeavors to create NFTs and games in a similar fashion, hence we now have a Lootverse, full of derivative NFTs and projects. However, very few have achieved the composition of utility.
The minimum viable economy is inspired by this composition of utility. We keep looking to build an autonomous world, neglecting the difficulty of building a complicated world. To compose utility, we have to figure out a universally applied "rule of physics", where the utility across contexts can be fairly and unilaterally applied, which would be very difficult, subject to endless debate and reasoning. Unlike the real world, where creating another set of physical rules is extremely costly & difficult, it is exponentially easier to construct various environments with different rule set. Another important factor often ignored when discussing in-game item composability is that they are intangible items. A tangible item such as a knife, would have similar utilities in two very different environments, may it be a remote island or a mega city. However, in the case of an intangible item, the context of its existence makes a huge difference. Take a law school degree for example, it holds very different utility across countries and sometimes even the person holding it, be it an employee of a law firm, or an employee of an international company, or a contributor of a DAO.
In a digital world where physics can be manipulated, and even created, with close to zero marginal cost, it would be more efficient if we were to imply utility under the context of economy, where the globally applied physics of an economy is only two items: value and liquidity. Both value and liquidity are closely correlated with scarcity, which is what blockchain is made for. By guaranteeing scarcity, blockchain provides a fair and transparent world of "physics", which deterministically provides proof of the value & scarcity of an item.
- In-game item composability is similar to how employers & governments in different countries agree on treating degrees in a similar way. Think of the Ivy League degrees to be highly "composable" with many employers across many countries, and a degree from a QF top 100 degree would have slightly less composability. This can only be achieved when the two games agree that the value & liquidity of different items are similar. Just like the value & liquidity of a student holding a degree. If a degree contains less training value, may it be industry changes or fewer educational resources, it's then less composable. If a degree can suddenly be mass-produced, may it be due to a lower barrier of graduation, it's then less composable.
Our Solution
Infrastructure - Adventure Layer, the L2 custom-made for FOCGs
To host the best ecosystem of FOCGs, we need an infrastructure that works. It has to be secured, scalable, and supports composability from the ground up. Earlier than publishing this manifesto, we published the whitepaper of Adventure Layer, an upgrade on Loot Chain which we learned a great deal of lessons. By leveraging sharding, EVM+WASM, and our dedicated SDK which allows developers to integrate with popular game engines, Adventure Layer is custom-built for developers to build FOCGs.
Ecosystem: Minimum Viable Economies + GDP, the right way to build & grow useful dapps
Now we have infrastructure developers & users who can comfortably call home, we have decided to take a rather unique approach to build a vibrant ecosystem of FOCGs. We imagine a successful ecosystem to be constituted with multiple successful economies, highlighting that they are self-sustainable, generating a healthy circulation of value & goods within themselves. It is then that onchain composability based on economic value & relative liquidity begins to make sense. Since even Rome wasn't built in a day, we have to take good care of these economies from day one. Bootstrapping Minimum Viable Economies would be our first priority since they are the foundation of a vibrant ecosystem. As healthy competition plays out, the users of Adventure Layer will be enjoying the highest quality of ecosystem projects, providing good value for both users as well as the ecosystem stakeholders. We expect to see a number of small economic loops first. As some of them begin to grow larger and faster, competition should emerge, driving the economic surplus to consumers naturally.
If you can't measure it you can't improve it. For most other L1/L2 users TVL, number of users, or real TPS as the metric for ecosystem vitality, we decided to go for GDP. By measuring the user’s spending & income, we introduce a metric that is much more meaningful than TVL. TVL itself is static, leaving the capital turnaround efficiency out of consideration. It's also a more helpful metric to pay attention to than TPS alone, which can be subject to low-cost manipulation.
Conclusion
Fully Onchain Games & Autonomous World are the pinnacle of onchain applications. At a time when the blockchain & crypto industry is looking for innovation and meaningful use cases, we have the opportunity of a lifetime to define the driving force of the next mass adoption. This manifesto delivers our beliefs, our mission, and our concrete steps forward. It's time to make blockchain great again.