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introduction

This paper presents a realisable and unique vision for the future of gaming built on top of
or using the XAYA (pronounced “zay-ya”) blockchain to manage increasingly complex and
appealing game worlds as well as securing and simplifying the ownership, sharing, and trade
of virtual assets.
The XAYA platform achieves this through the democratisation of game development and
deployment, allowing developers to bring their vision to life quickly with significantly reduced
costs. It will provide a wealth of tools and a state-of-the-art infrastructure for game developers to
build their own blockchain-based games. Furthermore, developers can fully leverage the XAYA
technology to issue their own game currency that can be traded for ‘CHI’ (the reserve currency
and “fuel” in the XAYA ecosystem - the X is pronounced ‘chi’ in the old greek alphabet) or other
XAYA game coins and assets.
Additionally to the benefit of gamers, developers can create fully decentralised, autonomous
games where players can expect 100% uptime and have provably fair gameplay with true
ownership of their in-game items.
Until now scaling has been a major difficulty for blockchains and particularly for massive
game worlds and their virtual asset inventories. The XAYA team has overcome this with
world leading breakthroughs in Trustless Off-chain Scaling for games (Game Channels)1
and Ephemeral Timestamps2 and will continue to invest strongly in this important and
novel field.
The assembled XAYA team is comprised of the original creators of blockchain gaming,
experienced developers, and blockchain and business experts. So whilst this is a new frontier
for cryptocurrency and gaming, the assembled team has the experience, insight, and initial
designs available to readily solve the challenges ahead. This will usher in a new era of gamechanging
blockchain technology and a whole new gaming ecosystem. XAYA is developed and
maintained by Autonomous Worlds Ltd.

Model Characteristics

The following describes the key characteristics of the solution to the problem statement (earlier)
in terms of gamers, developers and supporters.
For gamers:
¬ Provably fair gameplay
¬ Reliability and stability (i.e. 24/7 uptime)
¬ Secure virtual asset ownership
¬ Rapid and easy trade and/or sharing of virtual assets and conversion to real world value
(e.g. play to earn or Human Mining)
¬ Secure social networking
¬ Easy to use game app launcher
¬ Human readable wallet accounts and “addresses”
It should be noted that in blockchain gaming, provably fair gameplay is unique to XAYA.
Other asset trading platforms require developers to pre-create or spawn all items in a closed
environment, which means that items can be printed at will. Therefore items that have been
acquired by provably fair methods will inherently have greater value.
For developers:
¬ Fully-, partially-, or non-decentralised game development
¬ Supporting scalable massively multiplayer game development
¬ Virtual currencies and asset creation
¬ Ability to build gamer loyalty
¬ Broad game engine compatibility (e.g. Unity, Unreal, etc.)
¬ Exportable game engine templates (e.g. support for Unity assets and Unreal blueprints)
¬ Pre-built libraries
¬ Accepting and managing gamer payments simply, securely, and affordably
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For supporters:
¬ A cryptocurrency with high utility value (e.g. ‘CHI’ is the ‘fuel’ for games, creating
accounts, purchasing valuable in-game items, etc.)
¬ Access to large existing gaming markets
¬ Access to untapped gaming markets (e.g. virtual asset trading)
¬ Creation of new gaming genres (e.g. blockchain-based gaming and Human Mining)

Solution
The XAYA platform will provide a wealth of tools and infrastructure for game developers to
build their own game worlds that fit their vision and project. They can fully leverage the XAYA
technology to build decentralised games and issue their own game currency that can be traded
for CHI or other XAYA game coins/assets secured by the XAYA blockchain.
Scaling is a major difficulty for blockchains and particularly for massive game worlds. The XAYA
team has overcome this with breakthroughs in Trustless Off-chain Scaling for games (Game
Channels) and Ephemeral Timestamps and will continue to invest strongly in this important
field.

Technical Details

Building on this simple case, one can further extend and generalise game channels to work with
multiple players and for games that are not explicitly turn-based. For more details, we refer to

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The main issue that remains with the original game-channels design is the following: If a
dispute is raised but then resolved, the game continues as before. However, this process puts
transactions onto the main blockchain, thus removing the scalability gains and costing (both)
players transaction fees. A player whose objective is to disrupt a game built on top of XAYA
can thus repeatedly cause disputes and resolve them; this is not rational behaviour according
to game theory since it costs them unnecessary fees, but this strategy can nevertheless be
employed to irritate honest players and disturb the game platform.
The solution to this problem are ephemeral timestamps. They have the following useful two
properties:
*Nodes can send some data D to be timestamped at time T by the public P2P network
and blockchain. Due to a Merkle construction, this does not cost any blockchain space
or transaction fees per timestamp. Miners still have an economic incentive to process
these timestamps.
*Later, and only if necessary due to a dispute, such a timestamp can be used to prove to
the P2P network that another game participant could have known D at time T. This, in
turn, can be used to prove that this participant did not act in a game channel according
to the rules, and thus claim payout of the prize money. Only this act of actually using
the timestamp requires a transaction on the blockchain and transaction fees, which
are then offset by the prize money that is guaranteed to be paid out. In other words, the
cost incurred by the dispute will always be paid by the defecting player in the end via
awarding the game prize to the honest player.
With these properties, ephemeral timestamps allow us to improve game channels such that an
honest player can never lose any money due to a dispute. In the worst case, a defecting player
can just cause a minor disturbance, for which the honest player will be rewarded by winning the
game’s prize money on the spot.

Monetisation
Monetisation of games with XAYA is in many ways simpler than traditional methods. The following
is by no means an exhaustive list, but covers some common cases and how monetisation can
be achieved with XAYA.
A percentage of “banked” human mined coins go to the developer. A one-off fee to join or subscribe to the game, similar to how one would purchase a
boxed game.
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In-game stores can sell various permanent or consumable products, such as:
y Items
y Powerups
y Game coins or gems
y Unlock codes
In-game stores can sell various permanent or consumable services, such as:
y Healing
y Item repair
y Level-up training
In-game advertising or sponsored messages
Offer in-game services, such as an in-game trading platform
Or any method currently available to developers
How a game is monetised is entirely up to the developer, with the added invaluable benefit of
always being able to rely on the trustless, secure backing of the XAYA blockchain with no third
parties that can potentially disrupt payments.

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