B3 Whitepaper
Executive Summary
Gaming in our modern era has become ubiquitous across communities, geographies, and media; in its myriad forms it has become both an enormous industry and an integral aspect of modern digital life. Yet despite the industry’s growth and success, a set of gatekeeping entities and walled gardens has gradually emerged–as in many aspects of the tech world and larger economy. This consolidation worsens the experiences of gamers, restricts opportunities for developers, and reduces diversity within the industry. Traditional “off-chain” gaming feels bereft of the uninhibited innovation and fun that typified earlier decades–-it feels closed.
Web3 has for years presented itself as an alternative to the status quo, one bringing forth the components of a new paradigm for gaming focused around interoperability, greater community input, user-owned and transferable assets, and unique reward structures. The promise was open gaming. But this vision remains unrealized. A series of hurdles has largely prevented studios from diving in, gamers from migrating, and the broader web3 gaming ecosystem from blossoming. Community fragmentation has also been a major struggle for onchain gaming, with audiences isolated in discrete, largely unconnected ecosystems, impacting both discoverability and gameplay, and discouraging further innovation. Finally, and critically, it is tragic that an industry so focused on designing new open incentive systems has tacitly recreated many economic pressures against collaboration. The industry needs a broader vision and solutions to realize it.
We propose Open Gaming as a mandate, a suite of technical tools, and an incentive system to level up onchain gaming and usher in a golden era in gaming.
This features a sophisticated development engine capable of powering the next generation of onchain games and enabling them to rival if not surpass their web2 predecessors. A core Layer 3 (L3) blockchain that settles on Base, offering fast and cheap transactions, will offer new capacities to game developers. Games can launch their own customized GameChains that settle on the B3 L3 while leveraging best-in-class usability features like account abstraction, intents, and smart wallets. Over time, the Open Gaming ecosystem could include and integrate other chains alongside B3. This gives developers control over the game experience without having to grapple with the fragmentation that can come with traditional appchains.
Finally, Open Gaming is taking the challenge of misaligned incentives head on. A shared and open economic system can start to enable developers and infrastructure providers to benefit from each other’s growth and at minimum encourage cooperation in this critical period of attracting new users. A referral system that rewards the ecosystem for sharing users is just the first step.
Ultimately, these innovations promise to transform ‘web3 gaming’ into merely ‘gaming.’ To achieve this, Open Gaming, starting with the B3 L3, introduces a venue for the emergence of the most engaging and sophisticated games, for passionate gaming communities to coalesce, and with the larger gaming ecosystem itself becoming the largest beneficiary.
Gaming: A Crossroads
Games in many digital forms are enjoyed the world over. More than 3 billion global gamers enjoy an abundance of gaming platforms that let them engage virtually anytime and in any setting, from a mobile game on a subway to a console game on a large screen TV. That an estimated 8+ hours is spent weekly by the average gamer is a clear measure of gaming’s place in society.
Successive waves of innovation in technology and gameplay have radically expanded the assumed demographics of a ‘gamer.’ Nintendo’s Wii, Farmville on Facebook, Candy Crush Saga on mobile–all have brought more and more people into gaming. Gaming in turn has radically expanded its footprint in popular culture and media. From the dramatic growth and increasing acceptance of Esports, to the success of gaming-based movies and TV shows, the significance of gaming as a cultural force is clear. In many ways, to be digital these days is to have at least brushed up against gaming.
Nonetheless, the gaming industry and community today finds itself in a place of tension.
Offchain Gaming: Symptoms of gatekeeping
Despite the enormous expansion in the number of players and ways they play games, developers and gamers alike face some critical pain points.
Like many sectors of the tech ecosystem and the larger world, in recent years the gaming industry has increasingly concentrated in the hands of a small number of publishers and distribution platforms. For developers, this increases the challenge of standing out, leading to higher premiums on marketing and distribution, less emphasis on gameplay, and strong incentives against risk-taking. Pressures to rapidly ship product and to emulate tried-and-true models, both undermining creativity and risk taking, have become realities for game designers.
For an industry that has always been a conflux of self-expression, art, and commercial pursuit–more product oriented than independent film yet more artistic than consumer apps–many participants are deeply uncomfortable. Indeed, indie developers and risk-taking studios have long held an outsized role in pushing the gaming industry, culture, and community forward. Tetris, one of the most played games of all time, was developed by a single engineer. The genre of MOBAs (multiplayer online battle arena), responsible for more than a decade of successful esports in Dota 2 and League of Legends, was started from users modding popular Blizzard games. Minecraft was the genius of Markus "Notch" Persson and has gone on to define a generation’s experience of gaming, a golden age of user-generated content both in-game and throughout the Internet, and be a wild commercial success. It has been and remains imperative that risk-taking developers are able to thrive, yet today’s gaming industry is not structured in a way that supports them.
Gamers seem to feel the effects of this centralization too. Many complain of extractive business models, whether microtransactions, mobile’s free-to-play / pay-to-win model, endless in-game purchases, or the proliferation of account-gated games.
It is the best of times. It is the worst of times.
Elon’s tweet garnered over 75m views, suggesting it struck a deep chord.
Despite the growing footprint of gaming, the range of tools available to developers, and the relative ease of accessing games, dissatisfaction and discomfort is present throughout the industry. From a broader perspective it is unquestionably one of those periods of tension out of which meaningful transformations often emerge.
Onchain Gaming: Closed (again)
Web3 gaming represents an obvious direction for a potential gaming renaissance. It is a new digital and network technology. It is global, cross-platform, and prides itself on removing gatekeepers. It can make users direct stakeholders and offer developers new ways to fund themselves. On paper at least, the promise seems to match the moment.
Gaming has already played a critical role in the blockchain industry broadly, and it is just warming up. Cryptokitties, launched in 2017, was one of the first mainstream moments in all of crypto. While it is famous for almost halting the Ethereum blockchain, it can also be seen as the moment that drove home the importance of blockchain scaling solutions. In some ways, the larger blockchain industry has Cryptokitties to thank for massively expanding popular views of the potential of dapps—and how seriously people set to solving scaling issues.
Onchain gaming managed similar feats over the ensuing years, with Axie Infinity, STEPN, Parallel, and Pixels as just a few examples. Despite criticisms that onchain gaming has yet to have globally-significant impacts, sustained interest remains, with many platforms, investors, genres, and models deployed every quarter. Over the past four years, over $11B has been invested in web3 gaming across 900+ transactions. Over $1.5B of this total investment occurred during 2023, and approximately $900 million has been allocated to web3 gaming in 2024.
Trackers of web3 games list almost 1000 titles that have been launched across many different ecosystems in recent years. Many feature thoughtful experimentation with integrating digital assets, encouraging fun onchain, and self-funding approaches. Many blend offchain components and onchain components, using labels like Web2.5 or diet Web3. Surveying the space, even if a breakout game has yet to appear, the range of innovation hints at the potential of onchain gaming to usher in a new era.
The continued investment should be welcome. Even before blockchain was a buzzword, gaming has played a role in crystalizing new digital technologies. Over decades games have proven particularly powerful at evoking the potential of new technologies for entertainment, immersion, and play. For those who lived it, it is difficult to imagine the early days of computers without reference to Atari and to Oregon Trail. Early Windows users enjoyed Minesweeper, just as the earliest mobile phone users–using the gray bricks that predated smart phones–all had Snake. Importantly, and as noted above, each of these technological shifts simultaneously expanded the global gaming community even as gaming helped popularize the new platforms themselves.
Onchain hasn't meant Open
In sum, offchain gaming can benefit immensely from a new digital medium, particularly one that prides itself on permissionless innovation, removing gatekeepers, which has tools for creative funding models, and which ultimately is a potential way of addressing some of the industry’s existing tensions. In turn, onchain gaming, particularly in the wake of its visionary risk-taking pioneers, can benefit from additional attention and the reservoir of talent in the traditional gaming industry. And for the larger onchain space, gaming could serve the popularizing role it has with other technologies.
Realizing this potential, however, requires overcoming some significant challenges, all pointing to how we are seeking to take onchain gaming—and the entire industry—to the next level.
Definancialize and Diversify
Early generations of onchain gaming have explored only a slice of what is possible. Onchain gaming models were limited by immature infrastructure, and have involved a heavy focus on speculation and financialization. This is not unheard of in offchain gaming: the massive appeal of lootboxes in gaming, a thriving black market for leveled-up game accounts, and in-game resource farming operations as early as the mid-2000s suggest this intersection is neither new to gaming nor likely to ever go away. But today the shadow of this financial focus hangs over the entire onchain game industry. In some ways, “play to earn” is a damning confession, as if it is inconceivable that these games can be played purely for fun. This has given the industry a stigma that keeps would-be gamers and developers on the sidelines. The “gamefi” industry has a clear place in gaming globally but also has unquestionably produced only a slice of what’s possible in onchain gaming
The industry needs to expand beyond these approaches and win on metrics that matter to real people and reflect the broader realities of gaming today.
Universal Accessibility
Building onchain games can also be complex. Playing them frequently is as well, further compounding the difficulties for game developers. Some of these challenges are shared among all dapps but have particular salience for an industry where offchain predecessors maximize ease, addictive actions, and engaging content. These challenges include:
Players typically need crypto wallets to play. This means seed phrases, which can be terrifying to gamers accustomed to the world of passwords and password resets. It means identifying ideal wallets, many difficult to distinguish from each other, with features like native staking support that mean little to gamers.
Players often need to bridge assets between different chains. A game on Solana and a game on Ethereum might involve two different wallets, with complicated and expensive mechanisms for transferring funds between them. Multiple steps and transactions, waiting time for blockchain and bridge finality, and fees stand in the way of using most dapps, games included.
Players often need to fund their own gas, sometimes with custom gas tokens. The experience in practice is as counterintuitive as it sounds, like needing to physically change currencies for each city you visit, and sometimes needing new currencies for specific stores within each.
The above challenges constrain developers, impact games, lead to churn, raise the barrier to entry for creative studios, and too often make the magic of the game disappear.
Ecosystem Fragmentation and Disinteroperability
Most concerning of all, the web3 gaming ecosystem appears to be slowly regrowing some of the most troubling aspects of traditional gaming. Chains are heavily incentivized to become their own publishers and walled gardens, so as to drive transaction fee revenues and focus on the price of their own tokens. This also often forces game developers to choose particular chains for launch, each presenting technical tradeoffs, and stay there, or perhaps even to launch their own chain. To date, over 40 unique independent blockchains have or are hosting onchain games.
These incentives cut against the open ethos of blockchain and smart contract platforms. While this contradiction is not unique to the gaming sector, it is a concerning mindset for a genre that is so focused on opportunities to attract non-crypto users, non-whales, and demographics outside of the narrowest crypto stereotypes.
The industry should be looking to expand its collective footprint and player base, in the interest of expanding the overall space, rather than focusing on a perceived zero-sum competition and short-term impacts on the price of any individual tokens.
We need coop, not pvp, at the developer level right now.
The Next Step
A most tragic outcome would be recreating some of the challenges currently facing traditional gaming. Disgruntled gamers worried about extractive practices. A small number of gatekeeping entities with immense influence over which games and gaming models get prominence and effectively discouraging experimentation. These sadly already sound a bit familiar. Onchain environments and web3 gaming ecosystems do have the opportunity to recapture a core sentiment of the early internet and early gaming communities, that of a permissionless environment for making connections and distributing code to anyone anywhere. However, it is unclear if current trends, left undisturbed, can enable that.
Enter Open Gaming
Open Gaming is our vision of a secure, scalable, onchain gaming ecosystem that restores economic and creative freedom to game developers and players. In tangible terms, Open Gaming is a network of gamechains that share incentives, liquidity, and tooling, all working to increase access to both gamers and developers. The B3 L3 is the first chain in Open Gaming, for game developers who do not need their own customized chains, but will be joined by other developers who do. Parallel was the first to announce the PRIME gamechain on Open Gaming, on which their game Tau Ceti will launch; others will follow.
Functioning as an innovative gaming engine for developers, a community-focused publisher, and the go-to community on Base for web3 gamers can allow Open Gaming to bring these key value propositions to life.
Open Game Development
A primary benefit of Open Gaming’s technology is substantially lowering the barrier to designing, creating, launching, and running games. This starts with the core technologies needed to deliver onchain gaming experiences, building a platform to bring developers and gamers together, and supports the emergence of innovative gaming business models. The Open Gaming game engine brings together the key concepts that are making web3 development easier, faster, and richer, and will become the foundation upon which the next generation of industry-leading and genre-defining games is developed.
Open Gameplay
Gamers of all types need easier ways to find, play, and support onchain games anywhere. A set of usability upgrades is ready to welcome more users onchain. L2s and L3s are radically lowering transaction costs. Account abstraction techniques are removing much of the hassle of managing multiple onchain accounts, particularly across different L2s and different chains. Smart wallets are removing much of the traditional challenges of even having an onchain account. We are bringing these and more together to make the experience of onchain gaming much more seamless.
Open Access
A native Open Gaming marketplace and platform can include games published on any chain, using any set of tools, or using merely part of B3’s L3 capabilities, even behind the scenes. This will give developers necessary power for their games and complete control over their branding, community, technology, and trajectory. Finally, as a discoverability hub, Open Gaming is an inclusive, cross-chain environment where gamers are able to discover and play web3 games regardless of where they are published.
Open Narratives
Developers need more freedom in imagining gameplay that is onchain in more nuanced and less binary ways. Some games will want maximum state on a single chain, some might only need in-game items or game accounts onchain, and many will be somewhere between or even orthogonal. The web brought many new capabilities to gaming, including social features, access to massive shared worlds, leaderboards, or even just remote downloading. Designing games wasn’t a choice of being maximally social or maximally online. Developers need encouragement, a platform, and, critically, an economic layer designed to encourage innovation in onchain gaming.
The magic of the early Web was being able to visit any website. An early web user, after listening to their dial-up modem connecting to the Internet, could just ‘surf.’ Nothing at risk. Nothing to write down. No picking of servers, no specifying networking routes for queries, no changing browsers based on website settings. Crypto is closer to this user experience than ever before.
For example, B3’s unique stack lets developers focus on the internal game mechanisms and fun gameplay without worrying about limitations of the underlying technology or whether deploying with a particular partner is an irrevocable commitment to a particular ecosystem, chain, or publisher, and subject to the ecosystem’s own success or failures in attracting audiences. This is the promise of the Open Gaming mandate. This should yield more games, across many genres, and more varied in form.
Ultimately, the Open Gaming ecosystem is a space for gaming paradigms to evolve. Blockchain technologies have let entrepreneurs in many industries reimagine how business could work–and enjoy a permissionless place to build it. Exchange without intermediaries. Permissionless contribution and partnership. Users with stake in the game. Hard-to-change rulesets. Web3 remains a place of active experimentation and discovery. Gaming is early in its journey to doing something similar.
With Open Gaming’s core innovations and philosophy, it can take the next major leap.
Open Gaming's Core Components
Our Open Gaming strategy boasts a comprehensive toolkit, platform, and ecosystem to better match the potential of web3 gaming with the moment confronting offchain gaming and the current onchain gaming industries alike. Several core elements, described below, define B3’s ability to establish itself as the onchain gaming hub.
Development Engine
Starting with the B3 L3 and accompanying tools, we have an integrated technology platform for next-generation onchain gaming designed to radically lower the cost of development and encourage a wider range of creative expression. Less time spent micro-planning infrastructure is more time crafting great onchain experiences.
Base L3 + an L3 Superchain
L2s have dramatically lowered transaction costs and paved the way for L3s such as B3 to reduce them further. L3s and the systems they support let developers make more conscious tradeoffs between trustless security and user experiences like cost, latency, and throughput. This is particularly salient in gaming, where the goal is usually entertainment and not trustless yield and double-spend protection for wealth assets.
L3s are customizable chains, highly flexible in nature, and allow experimentation at the Virtual Machine (VM) layer and with concepts such as data availability and parallelization. The chains simply need to settle data onto an L2 in some capacity. L3s can be for specific dapps or for larger ecosystems; if the L2s are “hubs”, L3s can function as “spokes.” This drives the cost of using the chain down dramatically, enabling onchain micro-actions and more rapid gaming ticks.
They also provide powerful foundations for GameChains that settle on B3, allowing developers to enjoy control over their blockchain backend while still enjoying cross-game and cross-infrastructure compatibility.
The B3 L3 enables settlement for a new layer of computation, opening up architectural possibilities that more resemble the development experience in offchain gaming. This comes with superior performance but different security guarantees, composability, and data persistence–tradeoffs that resemble modern decisions about cloud-based architecture and enable developers to make more nuanced decisions about the optimal range of onchain activities within their games.
GameChains
While traditional appchains have contributed to economic fragmentation that complicates an already challenging journey for developers and gamers, it is also true that developers need to control the gaming experience and architecture at this nascent stage of onchain gaming. GameChains square this circle. They are fully customizable, with chain-in-a-box ease using the Open Gaming SDK and team expertise, while also settling on B3 for barebones costs. All GameChains interoperate with other GameChains and with the open utilities Open Gaming is building. All GameChains participate in the shared economy and benefit from the account abstraction tools and techniques that make Open Gaming so accessible.
Sprinter
Enabling the flexibility described above without reintroducing UX fragmentation is possible because of Sprinter, an account abstraction aggregator that serves the best possible path for an end user to perform a transaction, via chain, bridge or intent. Sprinter enables seamless bridging across and beyond the ethereum ecosystem, balancing abstraction across multiple wallets, intent-based interactions, and smart wallets, all of which promise to radically level up the onboarding experience for Web3. The result is designing for a Web2-like experience with confidence, not trying to architect around the clunky framing of being onchain. It also enables a dynamic L3 and L4 environment without confusing users. Ultimately, Sprinter helps realize the potential for a web3 app that is more competitive, easier to use, and easier to build than web2 apps.
Maximum throughput
EIP-4844 significantly reduced the cost of transacting on L2s, opening up new capacity. The almost immediate absorption of this capacity suggests the industry’s appetite for more throughput remains. If the cost of transacting in an onchain environment falls further, developers and users will find ways to fill the blockspace. Running game logic in an onchain environment creates digital history that anyone can leverage–communities looking for power players or entry-level gamers, game designers trying to understand where players typically stopped playing a game, or new tokens looking for who their future user base might be. Moving things onchain without congestion and prohibitive costs can open up new design space for games.
Horizontal scaling
One of the powers of L3s is the ability to support additional computation layers on top that still write state down to a secure chain. Rollups on top of B3 lets game activity leave an onchain footprint while keeping costs low. Such layers built on top of L3s can be spun up and down quickly, at minimal cost, to accommodate surges in demand. Such additional layers can be used as part of a strategy to scale game activity horizontally, relying on many parallel chains when games don’t need to keep all players and logic in the same environment. An esports tournament, a guild-created tournament, an influx of new players—all could be supported under the hood without clogging the experience of other players, much less other users of the chain. The Open Gaming engine can support this type of rollup spawning without game developers needing to build custom scaling solutions or contort their architecture.
Shared Liquidity
Gamers owning their own items, progress, characters, and game-progress footprint is a superpower of onchain gaming, but today these are scattered across many wallets, chains, rollups, and marketplaces. The complexity caused by different chains and assets across chains is a significant barrier to entry especially to those less familiar with crypto. This erodes the ultimate promise of gaming on a shared computation layer. To realize the vision of Open Gaming, players shouldn’t need to manually bridge or switch networks, creating a more fluid experience.
In B3, liquidity of onchain assets is shared and compounded across all GameChains through the B3 core framework’s seamless chain abstraction. The UX allows effortless movement of assets between games, eliminating the need for players to manually switch networks and bridge tokens. A player with tokens on GameChain A can seamlessly access those assets on GameChain B, without manually switching networks or bridge funds. This makes it easier for the player to try new games without additional UX overhead.
L3 Density
Using the infrastructure described above, B3 enables a ‘superchain’ at the L3 level. Optimism’s Superchain thesis is that because all OP Stack L2 chains run on the same stack, a Superchain can be formed between them to provide synced transactions, shared bridging, and compatibility for any future OP Stack chain to join this network.
In the interim, it is possible a “superchain” can be built at the L3 level. From a technical perspective, various virtual machines (VMs) can be run in parallel, which can still result in the outcome of synced transactions, shared logic, and compatibility to add new chains. From a go-to-market perspective, L2s would actively want to create a mechanism by which L3 builders can leverage existing tech, distribution, and tooling. Put simply, with an L3 superchain, builders get the product parity without the overhead of running their own chain.
While today’s trend is to have bespoke L3s for each dapp, the fragmentation and cost to manage an L3 will soon become apparent. The solution to this is L3 Density – a network effect formed when numerous, interoperable L3s settle onto the same L2 – as the driver of the next trillion transactions.
Base
The B3 ecosystem will be built on Base, which is best positioned to be the vehicle for the next billion people to get onchain. Importantly, Base has been developed transparently by a team constantly contributing to the broader crypto ecosystem. It has demonstrated a commitment towards supporting the growth of the overall web3 ecosystem, rather than moving towards a walled garden structure replicating the worst of web2 practices. It is affiliated with Coinbase, one of the most successful crypto onramps and responsible for bringing cryptoassets to millions of people and millions of people to the crypto industry. Finally, Base is built with an array of tooling that maximizes developer ease. Given the above, Base represents the ideal foundation for Open Gaming to emerge as the leading web3 gaming ecosystem.
Discoverability Layer and Other Apps
Places where buyers and producers come together have long fostered community while facilitating commerce and innovation. Actual physical marketplaces and bazaars facilitated the exchange of goods, ideas, and inventions in much of human history. For studios, it becomes easier to find the right gamers who might be playing games already like the ones the studio is making. For gamers, it is one place to look across a growing sea of creativity.
A central part of the Open Gaming vision is to support players finding and playing great onchain games, regardless of where they are. Though the B3 L3 is a flagship technology, the Open Gaming ecosystem will ultimately welcome other networks and will support apps that draw from across the onchain gaming landscape.
The capabilities of B3 initially match the needs of casual game designers while larger studios can work on technical integrations. This reflects the additional time and resources AAA games require but also the reality that casual games better reflect the more typical global experience of playing games: on phones, in shorter sessions, with low game-specific commitments.
Community is a powerful force in every context. This is particularly the case in Web3. From its earliest days, the Internet was hailed as a place where people could almost effortlessly find others of like mind. Onchain gaming communities today remain dispersed, however, and the Open Gaming ecosystem should be an inclusive environment where all web3 gamers can find their communities and the games that appeal to them.
Web3 has a toolkit with the power to disrupt extractive producer-consumer relationships dominating the web today and arguably support organic or more incentive-aligned communities. Building onchain accelerates network effects and facilitates partnerships. Tokens and trustless incentives can guide behavior more powerfully than user agreements and free services. Users can be co-creators. Power users can be more than cash cows. Influencers can be more than marketing strategies. In an era of gamer exhaustion at the latest tricks in monetization, a dedicated community infrastructure for gamers, empowered by tokens, will feel radical.
Shared Incentives
An unfortunate reality of the fragmented landscape of onchain games today are disincentives for true interoperability. Games and chains don’t want to share users, who are often generators of transaction fees and primary token buyers. Games have weak incentives to integrate the items and mechanisms of other games, who themselves have already reaped the economic benefits from minting them. Even gamers can face poor incentives to grow a game’s userbase and dilute their own airdrop earnings. This is doubly tragic in an industry that prides itself on reinventing the economics of internet applications.
Combatting this will take time, but we believe it is a battle worth fighting.
The first step is a referral and revenue-sharing mechanism that collects a portion of transaction revenue for reinvestment in the ecosystem. Referring users that generate more transactions can benefit everyone in the ecosystem. In addition, any gamechain that commits a portion of their tokens toward user acquisition (UA) and also brings in a new user can earn B3 tokens. B3 will also bootstrap the initial incentive pool for the purpose of user acquisition (e.g. influencers, creator referral program) by contributing a portion of the B3 token supply.
Opportunities for Key Stakeholders
B3’s infrastructure can reach many types of actors and stakeholders, with features and benefits for each.
Game Developers
Web3 is a new frontier for gaming that game developers of all types can embrace. Open Gaming offers a new toolkit to turn users into partners, to engage creatively with a game community, and to fund game creation. It is a deployment platform not dominated by gatekeepers and intentionally established against it.
Open Gaming’s unique suite of infrastructure, tools, and platform lowers barriers of onchain game development. This should enable onchain gaming to find broader expression and develop novel structures, better reflecting and even expanding beyond the myriad ways offchain gaming is experienced today.
Over the past one and a half decades, the “onchain” industry has been inexhaustible in producing new narratives. It finds ways to defy rumors of its own death. This resiliency speaks to an underlying value of web3 gaming and a desire within the gaming space to see new approaches emerge. We believe that with the advancements of the technology in general, and specifically in regards to the tools and infrastructure it is introducing, onchain gaming is finally ready to play a central role in the evolution of gaming.
Gamers
Lowering the barrier to entry for gamers will help them find the experiences they are looking for and hopefully ones they like but did not know existed. They can experiment with new forms of gameplay without crossing the UX chasm being onchain has required until now. They can also be co-funders, co-builders, and co-advocates for game developers bringing their own visions into the world.
Base and the Base Ecosystem: Base may be the platform for the next billion onchain users. It is an open and neutral L2, without a native token and incentives to maximize the value of one and with a track record of contributing to the base Ethereum ecosystem. It celebrates builders and will continue to do so. It is adjacent to millions of offchain crypto users who might be curious about the technology but intimidated by the UX prospects of being onchain.
We can continue the tradition of celebrating builders and giving back to its base ecosystem. More transactions. Amplifying community. Bridgeless usability. Onchain fun.
The Gaming Industry
Games have also long functioned as a powerful vehicle for popularizing new technology. In some ways, technology benefits from gaming exploring and advancing its own limits as much as gaming benefits from new technologies. From this perspective, an argument that blockchain technologies—that by any measure have a far wider range of use cases than gaming—may nevertheless find gaming to be a powerful force both in advancing the technology and in introducing users to the technology as it engages new audiences, is a compelling vision. Open Gaming, with innovative tech improving game design as well as gameplay, and a social and community layer poised to make it a genuine web3 gaming hub and discovery layer, can play a critical role in making onchain gaming accessible and exciting.
B3 Token Overview
The B3 token will play a variety of roles in the Open Gaming ecosystem, with applications for developers, gamers, and governance.
For developers, the token can help spur activity on B3 and throughout the Open Gaming ecosystem, reward great games, and serve as an anti-sybil measure. A variety of grant and patronage opportunities can enable developers to bring their creations to life on B3. At the same time, developers can use the token for fees and visibility.
For gamers, the token will be used to facilitate cross-game commerce or special perks. This could include questing, playtesting, feedback, purchasing unique items and powerups, and other forms of engagement that historically have made gaming such a unique human activity.
For anyone interested in governance, the token will help direct the DAO that sets policies, supports protocol upgrades, and oversees the treasury.
Token Allocation and Supply
More exciting information about the B3 token utility will be shared as the ecosystem unfolds. Stay tuned!
Governance
The Open Gaming ecosystem will need a variety of governance rules. The vision for onchain gaming is big and bold. The toolkit the B3 L3 and other supporting technologies provides is powerful and expressive. The winning strategy for the gaming ecosystem as a whole is still taking shape. It will take a dedicated community and a flexible governance system to navigate us all to the next stages.
More on the specific governance structure will be forthcoming, but we generally anticipate three modes of engagement.
Proposals: a proposal system allows for ideas to emerge from the community that delegates may not think of or have the capacity to develop on their own. It also gives the entire community a direct voice.
Voting: token holders can be active participants in shaping the future of the B3 and Open Gaming ecosystems, embodying an important step towards the decentralization this industry stands for.
Councils: specialized councils are an effective way to align expertise, particularly technical, with relevant decision making.
All of these have precedent in robust governance systems–and notably, are absent from the gaming production industry that has generated so much gamer discontent. Open Gaming is for gamers and governance will reflect that.
Conclusion
In an earlier era, going online ultimately meant many things for both games and players. It wasn’t just chatting in-game or playing with strangers. Entire new genres, like MMOs and server-grade worlds, became possible. User-generated content, on small scales and for entire games, became more commonplace. People talked about games online, volunteered their time to create tutorials for other players, and spawned a streaming industry. All of this was built upon novel in-game mechanisms and experiences that provided a foundation for and inspired these activities. Just like one could not have predicted the range of developments in the early days of online gaming where games like Tetris and Minesweeper represented the cutting edge of innovation, one cannot forecast exactly what innovations web3 and onchain gaming may bring.
The innovations discussed in this paper contain both challenges and opportunities; together they represent an agenda for addressing issues in gaming and looking to the future of the industry. They shape Open Gaming’s ability to foster a web3 gaming ecosystem where it is easier to build and access new games, and above all more engaging to play. This ecosystem enriches the experience of existing onchain gamers, has resources for a community to emerge, flourish, and shape the future of the platform and gaming in general, and welcomes and supports the transition of web2 gamers moving onchain.
In the context of a gaming universe where Apple’s App Store had nearly 300,000 titles available in 2023, and where only 1,000 web3 games have been released in total, the opportunity space before web3 is clear. Innovative platforms like B3’s L3 and the Open Gaming ecosystem that deliberately address key hurdles that have limited the experience of web3 until now—from infrastructural, community, and user experience and onboarding perspectives—are critical in ushering in and unleashing the potential of a new era that promises to become not merely the next phase of web3 gaming or the global gaming space, but of the online and onchain experiences themselves.
1 Russel, Charlie, The State of Online Gaming, Edge.io 2021. Retrieved from: https://edg.io/blogs/state-of-online-gaming-2021/ Jul 5, 2024
2 Jordan, Jon. Everything Blockchain Gaming. bigblockchaingamelist.com. https://bit.ly/web3gamedata. Accessed Dec 8, 2024.