April 15 (Cointime) - Scalability has become the biggest obstacle to the development of Web3 games, and issues such as high gas fees and low liquidity are greatly affecting the on-chain interaction experience of Web3 users. With the rise of the ZK innovations, ZK technology is seen as one of the best solutions to on-chain congestion and scalability issues. Multiple networks and projects, including Ethereum Layer2 and its side chains, are focusing on and applying ZK technology, hoping to use it to support more users and applications. At the same time, Layer2 ZK networks exclusively for games are changing the development pattern of GameFi and NFTs.

On April 14th, the “ZK New Infrastructure Entrepreneur Brunch” event, hosted by zkMeta and Polygon and jointly hosted by Alibaba Cloud, Particle Network, and O3 SWAP, was successfully held in Hong Kong. The event attracted many institutions and builders related to GameFi, cross-chain, NFT, ZK and other technologies. They discussed topics such as on-chain game infrastructure, new business models for NFT and GameFi via ZK technologies, new infrastructure, current pain points, opportunities and challenges of public chains, providing new development ideas for Web3 game developers and teams.

At the event, zkMeta and O3 Swap gave themed speeches. As one of the organizers, Polygon Founder Sandeep specially sent a congratulatory video to wish the event a success, and expressed his optimism about Hong Kong as a new Web3 land. He said that this Web3 event week in Hong Kong has brought new vitality to the industry and is rapidly becoming a gathering place for Web 3.0 innovation in the Asia-Pacific region. At the same time, Sandeep also expressed his expectation of working with Chinese development teams. As an important ecological partner of Polygon, zkMeta will work together with Polygon for the large-scale adoption of Web3, bringing new traffic to the industry. Meanwhile, zkMeta has reached a strategic partnership with Polygon to discover high quality Chinese development teams.

zkMeta, a game-specific layer 2 network based on Polygon, is committed to providing a super low gas fee and smooth interactive experience. Adam Zhao, the founder of zkMeta, shared his insights on the current state of L1, ZK technology, the development of blockchain games, and the transition from Web2 to Web3 games. Adam Zhao holds an EMBA degree from the University of Cambridge and previously worked for British Telecom, where he was responsible for a high-frequency trading network in the financial industry. After returning to China, he founded a programmatic advertising platform called Proton Cloud and focused on traffic acquisition and monetization in the gaming industry. At the end of 2020, Adam transformed the Web2 game “Fist of Truth” into a Web3 card game called Era7: Game of Truth, which is still among the top three DAU ranking games on BNBChain.

According to Adam, the transition from Web2 games to the Web3 world involves multiple complex decisions, including user source (Web2 vs. Web3), content type (virtual props vs. NFT assets), revenue model (fiat currency vs. digital currency), and value capture (one-time fee vs. transaction fee). When Web3 games reach a certain scale, they will face infrastructure bottlenecks. Therefore, zkMeta aims to help Web2 game studios smoothly enter the Web3 world with mature gameplay by completing the three-step fusion of NFTs, tokens, and communities. As a game-specific L2, zkMeta will work with Polygon to seek and incubate benchmark games in the Chinese market and reduce the barriers for both users and developers based on specific business logic.

O3 Swap is a cross-chain aggregation protocol launched by O3 Labs. Matt Powers, the Communication Director of O3 Swap, shared about the universal liquidity solution for cross-chain transactions. According to Matt, O3 Swap is committed to linking the liquidity of various blockchain networks to achieve the integrity of decentralized finance. Matt also shared his team’s recent launch of the scalable NFT cross-chain bridge, NFT Shuttle, to improve the liquidity of NFTs.

After the keynote speech, a panel discussion titled “GameFi Infrastructure Choices: New Public Chains, Layer 2 Networks, or Application Chains” was discussed between Kenneth, Head of Project at Animoca Brands, Wade, CTO of Footprint Analytics, Madeira, Co-founder of Matr1x, and Kevin Shao, Co-founder of ABGA and Bitrise Capital.

During the discussion, the guests shared their own logic for choosing GameFi infrastructure and expressed their optimism for the future development of blockchain gaming. They believed that with the rise and widespread application of new technologies such as ZK, the innovation and development of related infrastructure in the blockchain gaming industry will bring new patterns to the Web3 market, which is expected to provide ultra-low gas and high TPS blockchain gaming infrastructure. Moreover, the development of GameFi infrastructure choices will become more diverse and tend towards “personalization.” In addition to being feasible, suitability will also be an important selection factor. On thede basis, the development of GameFi will continue to advance. Furthermore, cross-chain and multi-chain interoperability are crucial for the development of blockchain gaming, and reducing the sense of fragmentation between different ecosystems is an important goal for projects.

Despite still being in its early stages of development, applications based on ZK technology are emerging rapidly, and a new era for ZK is approaching. GameFi and NFTs will also have the opportunity to develop in new ways thanks to this technology.

For more details please refer to: https://zkmeta.io