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A16z analyst: Web3 can be combined to achieve the crypto cat, Axie Infinity and other chain games

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One of the biggest achievements of composability is that it allows digital value to persist in the "real world."

Elena Burger, A16z crypto analyst

Kyle, the Way of the Metadverse

The core value unique to Web3 is composability: the ability to take assets or data generated by one protocol and use it with another. In web3 games, composability unlocks something powerful -- for the first time, players can participate in the mechanics and values that guide the game itself.

If you look at the history of Web3 (it's early!) You'll notice that composability is in the DNA of all of them. It's no exaggeration to say that these games are successful because they were built with composability in mind.

Take CryptoKitties, for example. Designed to let players breed, cast, and trade rare NFT cats, the game has a number of composable features that enhance gameplay and enhance the ecosystem -- and was built with blockchain possibilities and challenges in mind.

On the surface, CryptoKitties seem simple

Raise two cats, breed them and create an offspring with rare Cattributes. But the real birth of CryptoKitties requires innovation in the architecture of smart contracts and allows for the emergence of a whole new economy.

CryptoKitties have to contend with the reality of on-chain design: There are no timers in the Ethereum network to dictate when contracts are executed. Although in theory the time between breeding and giving birth to a cat is about 40 minutes, external actors need to call this function.

This reality creates a new (white hat!) An ecosystem of robot operators that enter and earn user-paid fertility fees.

Since the CryptoKitties contract is open source, users can even create an entire front end to invoke giveBirth(). Back in 2018, things like & NBSP; @dominiek Such users can earn around $100 an hour doing so.

Because CryptoKitties is open source and extensible, more community members have devised other automation mechanisms. One team has opened source a special-purpose client that allows users to bid on cats with new features before they are even presented on the CryptoKitties website.

In addition to these features, CryptoKitties is also beginning to showcase games and features created by other communities, called Kittyverse, which includes combat and racing games, marketplace clients, and even social networks.

One team even created a fully functional test net to make it easier for developers to iterate over their modules. CryptoKitties is an early sign that when you build applications around composability, you'll likely be working with a team of highly dedicated modders and remixers.

Cryptokitties have inspired a new generation of builders: The founding team of Axie Infinity met while playing the cat-collecting game. In fact, an early blog post by @Jihoz_Axie on evaluating digital collectibles, ‌, used a rare Trands Cryptokitty as an example.

But Axie soon went beyond the NFT collection

Entered a more complex combat and strategy game that required earning experience points, which later became an alternative ERC-20 token called Smooth Love Potion (SLP). Early in the history of SLP deployments, the team noticed something interesting.

While the SLP was just a simple in-game token acquired through the game, the users of Axie Infinity created the Uniswap pool in December 2019 and began trading the SLP as an actual asset.

It is hard to overstate how radical this is. Players of web2 games cannot immediately create an ERC-20 pool, port their in-game assets to an automated market maker (AMM) like Uniswap, and then swap them for another token outside of the game's own package.

These worlds are designed to be closed, not combinable. Web2 assets are limited to platforms such as games or Steam community markets, so there is no way to move items or money out of the ecosystem. Composability between assets and protocols makes SLP pooling possible.

Arguably more groundbreaking came 1.5 years later, in August 2021, when merchants in the Philippines began accepting SLP payments. By now, Axie had amassed millions of players, transitioned to Ronin side chains and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue for its users.

None of this would have happened without the initial SLP-ETH pool on Uniswap, which is made possible by composability between protocols. For the first time, users can determine the economic value of the game they are playing, and then extend that value to the physical world.

One final example: Dark Forest is an on-chain strategy MMO where the player's goal is to expand their territory by conquering planets and mining resources. Games use zero-knowledge proofs to mask player location information; Unpacking a map requires outputting hash power to "mine" coordinates.

There are two key innovations in dark Forest

1) All game logic is on the chain, making it easy for developers to create plugins and custom clients

2) It was one of the first "incomplete information" encryption games; Players only know their location and the planets they have

The Dark Forest user plugin shines a light on the most exciting parts of the game. Players have created everything from the in-game NFT market to a plug-in that automatically schedules movement to a "remote snarker" that speeds up the player's ability to hash unknown parts of the map.

The last example is crucial. In games with incomplete information, information itself becomes the most valuable asset. Other signs emerged during the game. Some players have even outsourced computing to AWS to mine and discover dark forest maps faster than their competitors.

One of the coolest plugins Dark Forest users have generated is Broadcast Market, which creates a trading platform that allows users to reveal the location of one of their planets every day in exchange for a bounty, allowing users to value the data in the game itself.

You may have noticed that in these examples value comes organically around player output and consensus. CryptoKitties has fertility robots and add-on games, Axie community members created the first SLP pool and accepted it as IRL currency, and Dark Forest has information mining and brokerage services.

One of the biggest achievements of composability is that it allows digital value to persist in the "real world." In fact, it is force that breaks down the barrier between the two. We are post-" virtual "and" physical "-- permeable Spaces where only value can flow freely.

Web3 games give users the structure to create these new worlds; In many cases, the original game world is just a small part of the overall ecosystem. While it's still early days, the high composability of smart contracts makes this possible.