Original author: Hill Tan (Adventure Layer AGLD), Lewis Arnsten (Supersize)
I. Financial markets as a game
Financial markets are a type of game where players increase their wealth by trading with each other. This model shows unique advantages in solving several core problems faced by traditional games. Through reasonable design, Web3 games have the potential to solve these problems.
1. Power imbalance between creators and players: Game creators can often change the rules of the game at will, while in financial markets, creators have far less influence on the game than players do. In the past, although hedge funds, banks, and governments had strong control over financial markets, it ultimately led to the birth of Bitcoin and decentralized finance (DeFi). In these decentralized markets, once financial instruments are deployed, creators have almost zero control, which makes the power of players and creators more balanced.
2. The power imbalance among amateurs, professionals and robots: In traditional games, it is almost impossible for amateurs to consistently beat professionals or robots. But in financial markets, the situation is different. Although retail investors are at a disadvantage in technology, information and capital scale, they can beat most fund managers through index funds, who are usually professionals and have the ability to trade using robots.
In short, financial markets are an attractive game because the game environment is shaped by the players’ activities, not by the creators. This gives “markets as games” several unique characteristics:
1. Different victory conditions for different players: Different players have different victory conditions depending on their trading goals and strategies. Players do not have to pursue a unified goal. Traders with different bankrolls, different ROIs and different time periods have their own strategies to participate, play and eventually exit the game. This ensures that the financial market as a game can maintain a long-term player base.
2. Transparent environment and traceable history: Each players current state and history are public, allowing players to develop strategies against each other. This transparency makes it difficult for any player to maintain an advantage in the long run, making the game fairer and, to a certain extent, more fun. As a result, this gaming environment helps to continuously generate excess returns.
3. Minimal input from creators to the environment: The vast majority of information driving trader decisions is generated by other traders, such as current asset prices, order book patterns and depth, etc. This allows players to coordinate and significantly change the game environment. The most famous example is the Wallstreet Bets community versus hedge funds on GameStop stock.
Therefore, the financial market is the only use case in the Web3 space that has truly achieved product-market matching (PMF) because blockchain is able to provide a more transparent and traceable environment than most off-chain financial markets.
II. Designing Full-On-Chain Games (FOCG) Like Financial Markets
To create a game in the Web3 world that can achieve product-market fit (PMF) similar to financial markets, we must focus on replicating the unique characteristics of markets as games. This includes designing a transparent and traceable game environment that is generated by the players activities and provides them with different victory conditions.
The io games in the Web2 world (such as agar.io, slither.io) fit well with this model. The simplicity and minimalist style of io games ensure that creators have little control over the game environment except for setting up the game server. Players can easily create and modify their own versions of the game, similar to forking the on-chain protocol. In addition, the real-time multiplayer battle mode of the game allows human players to defeat professional players and robots through innovative strategies and coordination. In the game, advantages can be obtained through multiple aspects, such as capital scale, decision-making ability, efficient collaboration in resource acquisition, etc.
Adventure Layer has been searching for a game type that is completely on-chain. After three years of experimenting and consolidating the theory around fully on-chain games, we are excited to have found Supersize, a new game studio that is highly aligned with our unique approach to FOCG.
III. Supersize Introduction
Supersize.gg is a FOC (Full On-Chain Control) version of agar.io, providing players with an experience similar to participating in financial markets. Players use tokens to enter the game, can enter the game at any time with any number of tokens, and can exit at any time and settle their scores in tokens.
In Supersize, larger players move slower than smaller players, but can speed up and devour smaller players by consuming tokens. Supersize’s game state and logic are fully on-chain, and the game runs in real time.
Game Design (Token Integration):
Supersize takes place on a live and constantly updating map that is dotted with free tokens that all players can eat. Each game is powered by a single token and has a wallet that holds the games funding pool.
Players join the game by paying tokens and spawn a small ball of the same size as the number of tokens paid. When new players enter, new tokens are added to the map in proportion to the number of tokens in the games funding pool.
When a player exits, an exit tax is collected. Most of this tax is used to compensate for the tokens added to the game, and is eaten up by all players in the form of small tokens; a small portion is retained in the fund pool, allowing each game to capture value over time. This mechanism ensures that successful Supersize games can continue to increase the number of tokens in the map as players join.
Supersize games start liquidity by attracting speculative players. When Supersize games are attractive enough, they will attract larger institutional players and robots, which will develop strategies to maximize their returns. Then, some Supersize games will become winners and attract most of the liquidity through interesting models or superior incentive mechanisms.
Supersize vs. Trading:
Supersize mimics the feeling of trading. Players can get 10 times the return in a short period of time, and can also cash out at any time to lock in the gains, thereby achieving different victory conditions for different players. Therefore, players will feel the excitement of accumulating profits while constantly devouring other players and expanding their spheres.
Supersize is very similar to futures trading: users only experience a derivative market of profit and loss. The upside is huge, but the downside risk is also high. There is no token exchange and no pricing. In addition, Supersize can fully support prediction markets based on player activity, lending, leverage, and insurance mechanisms, which will affect player behavior in the game. Professional users can profit by providing information and tools, giving players a competitive advantage, resulting in higher profits or trading volume, similar to the model of professional traders using Bloomberg and ordinary users using Robinhood.
Because Supersize has a transparent environment and traceable history, its evolution path is similar to the memecoin market, where players can formulate strategies based on the behavior of other players on the chain.
Supersize policy example:
- Risk-free path selection: The bot can monitor the on-chain status and calculate the ideal path to collect free tokens.
- Counterattack Strategy: Human players can watch robots move along fixed paths and coordinate actions to devour these robots to obtain their tokens.
- Bait Strategy: Players can spawn a bait ball of size 100 and place several predator balls of size 500, then place the predator balls in the path of enemies chasing the bait ball.
IV. Conclusion
Combining the findings and lessons learned from those who have achieved product-market fit (PMF) and those who failed, we believe that FOCG (Full Chain Games) are the natural next step in the evolution of on-chain financial primitives and financial markets. By providing a familiar and easy-to-learn gaming experience combined with a completely on-chain environment, Supersize has the potential to become the next killer app, inspiring hundreds of on-chain games and applications that follow the same set of principles: variable victory conditions, transparency, traceability, and user-generated environments. This approach also unlocks the potential to add complex strategies, third-party clients, Mods, derivatives, and other value-added services and tools. The potential of a FOCG ecosystem like Supersize is at least on par with DeFi, or even greater.
Adventure Layers mission is to promote FOCG on a large scale based on this theory, and Supersize is the best example. We hope to see more FOCGs implement the design principles mentioned in our theory, and welcome all FOCG enthusiasts to work together in this direction.
