Hoard is the First to Use the OMG Network

Hoard partnered with OmiseGO to make True Ownership in video games a reality. The partnership is a match made in crypto-heaven because OmiseGO’s ambitious mission is to Unbank the Banked. Consider this: who is more “banked” than gamers? Except for a handful of blockchain-based game experiments, all video game assets ever are held by a custodian — their games’ servers. There is no such thing as cash in these synthetic worlds! (at least not yet)

While the long term vision of the OMG Network is primarily to process traditional financial payment activities, it makes a lot of sense to begin with video games. Video games require all the same functionality as legacy finance: you need to be able buy, sell, trade, rent, loan, collateralize, incorporate (guilds), etc. In fact, in many cases video games require greater levels of complexity than are even possible in the real world.

The point is: video games are a $100 billion per year industry that can simultaneously operate as a sandbox for innovation for the larger Ethereum ecosystem. They’re a perfect place to #BUIDL.

Bringing Plasma Dog to Life with Vysehrad

Tesuji Plasma

Tesuji Plasma’s architecture allows users to take advantage of cheaper transactions with higher throughput without sacrificing security. The design is heavily based on the Minimal Viable Plasma design.

Tesuji is the initial implementation of Plasma by OmiseGO and is the basis for the first release of the OMG Network. It has been on OmiseGO’s internal testnet since August and is the infrastructure upon which Hoard built Plasma Dog. As a nod to the hard work done by the OmiseGO team, we incorporated all of the key architectural features, such as double spends, fraudulent exits, and UTXOs, into the design of the characters and mechanics of the game. Check out the list of Plasma Dog’s enemies, friendlies, and rewards!

Evil Double Spends! Don’t let them touch you!

Enemies

Insufficient Funds Transaction

Unallocated Lot

Double Spend

Fraudulent Exit

Faulty Child Chain

Invalid Block

Node Collusion

Fraudulent Exits! They erratically fly between blocks in Blockchain World!

Friendlies

User Deposits

Atomic Swap

Rewards

UTXOs

But don’t just read about it — play the game yourself! It’s live for everybody during the DevCon4 Contest (even if you’re not in Prague!) Check out the game now → HERE 🐶

Plugging the OMG Network Libraries into Plasma Dog

In September we announced that the latest stages of our SDK are complete, which includes user authentication, checking ownership of items, and transferring game items. This has effectively moved us into the alpha stage of development where we are testing the kit with a handful of current games. To further test the requirements of what it means to have True Ownership within a game we developed our very own Plasma Dog with a Phaser JavaScript engine!

Brainstorming session at Hoard — led by Lead Developer, Cyryl Matuszewski.

As previously mentioned, Plasma Dog’s internal reward is a token, which is simply called UTXO. UTXOs are distributed to players for standard gameplay; they’re collected as Plasma Dog traverses Blockchain World. Whenever new coins are collected by the player, UTXO Tokens are sent by the server to the player’s wallet. Once the token is in your wallet, players are then able to transact with them freely. In the case of DevCon4, we wanted players to be able to prove their ownership of tokens to be able to award them prizes of backpacks, physical tokens, shirts, and stickers!

To develop secure transaction functionality, Hoard integrated the current JavaScript Library for Tesuji into Plasma Dog. The library has two separate submodules: the omg-js-childchain and the omg-js-rootchain. We developed Plasma Dog on a childchain and enabled the game to “transact UTXO & other tokens through the childchain.” Of course, we allowed players to “transact UTXO through the childchain,” as well.

Additionally, we built a leaderboard for DevCon, which utilized a “fetch spendable UTXO of an address” implementation of the library to display who had collected the most tokens during the contest.

The architecture for Tesuji Plasma ensures that watchers validate the plasma chain operator. In the instance of Plasma Dog, OmiseGO acted as the validator on their internal testnet.

When we deployed Plasma Dog at DevCon4, we leveraged OmiseGO’s internal testnet for validation. At the conference and during the contest, OmiseGO acted as the Plasma Chain Operator using a Proof-of-Authority (PoA) scheme. Due to the robust nature of the Tesuji Plasma architecture, all players assets were fully secure. The design ensured that even if OmiseGO were to behave maliciously, all players would (theoretically, if Tesuji were connected to mainnet) be able to exit their assets to the main Ethereum rootchain (in this case, they could exit to the Tesuji testnet rootchain) without penalty, compromise, or loss of funds.

In other words… All Plasma Dog players had True Ownership of their video game items!