The golden key of the whole chain game: arcade account

Thanks to the Play-to-earn model, GameFi games like StepN quickly became popular and drove more and more funds into the track. According to statistics from Blockchaingamer, a blockchain game platform service provider, as of November 2022, the investment in the blockchain game field has reached 2.56 billion US dollars. However, due to the immature economic model and infrastructure, the GameFi concept under the capital blessing quickly cooled down.

In 2023, people will turn their attention to full-chain games. For full-chain games, in addition to the digital assets in the game, all the logic of the game also occurs on the chain, which means that every state change of the game contract needs to be registered on the chain, and players need to be responsible for every change in the game. Operations are performed by signing transactions, which is a very bad player experience for high-frequency operation games like RTS real-time strategy.

Session Key (Session Key) is a solution to solve the inherent bad gaming experience of encrypted native games. It aims to use account abstraction and some ingenious innovations on Starknet, so that encrypted game players do not need to frequently sign transactions for each operation. And today, Loot Realms released the first session key based implementation - Arcade Accounts. With the Arcade Account function, players can securely store their keys in browser storage, eliminating the need to sign each in-game "attack" operation, resulting in a smoother player experience.

What Exactly Are Arcade Accounts? What is its operating principle? Before answering these questions, let's understand the session key (Session Key).

What is a session key?

The session key is an idea jointly initiated by the three teams of Briqs, Realms and Topology at the Starknet hackathon 1 year ago, aiming to use account abstraction and some clever innovations on Starknet to solve the inherent bad experience of encrypted native games—— Players need to execute transaction signatures for every operation in the game.

In the game scene on the chain, every operation in the game will pop up a wallet pop-up window and require the user to confirm "Do you want to confirm this transaction?" At the same time, there are some content that most people cannot understand, which may Can lead to mistakes, confusion, and even lost money.

Session keys allow users to pre-approve rules for interacting with specific Dapps, for example, only for a specific duration, maximum gas limit, limit the maximum transaction amount of tokens, or specific functions of specific contracts, etc. This way, gamers can interact as they wish within these defined rules without having to sign every transaction.

In other words, with the session key, players can enjoy the fun of the Dapp while confirming that their assets are protected. Because Session keys have restricted what Dapp can do and what it cannot do. This means you won’t be plagued by endless confirmations when you play on-chain, knowing that the most valuable assets in your wallet are safe.

What are Arcade Accounts?

Arcade Accounts is the first implementation of session keys on Starknet by the Realms team using account abstraction.

By employing a (privileged) middleware that allows Realms players to create new types of arcade accounts, this can greatly improve the user experience of on-chain gaming.

Essentially, an arcade account is a Starknet account, but with some functional variations, including:

• Every Arcade account has a master account

• Except for the main account, accounts at other levels cannot transfer ETH/Tokens out

• Other accounts can only sign transactions unless authenticated

That said, Arcade accounts only provide limited player functionality, and these permissions restrictions minimize security risks, and even if an arcade account is exploited, the attacker is powerless because the main account can withdraw all funds and create a new arcade account.

The "declare contract" method unique to Starknet reduces the cost of adding an Arcade account to around 20 cents.

How was the arcade account experience? Loot Realms demonstrated the intuitive experience that an Arcade account brings to gamers in the lightweight mini-game Loot Survivor—“a smooth in-game interactive experience, without the need to sign every attack operation.”

When the arcade account is not used, the player needs to sign a message for each attack operation in the game and wait for a long confirmation time. After adding the Arcade Account, the user can safely store the key in the browser storage, and there is no need to Message signature, directly carry out the attack operation in the game.

The above are just some basic functions implemented by contracts as accounts (Contracts as Accounts). Loot Realms will implement two advanced functions next: automatic recharge when ETH is insufficient and transfer out when tokens arrive in the account.

In fact, the session key is not an exclusive technology of Starknet, and the Session Key function of the full-chain game is only one of the use cases unlocked by the account abstraction (Account Abstraction). With the popularization and expansion of the account abstraction scheme, the wallet will become more Security is also easier to use, and the Web3 world will welcome more users.

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