Playing with Ethereum, the map editor of electronic cash | Ping Chen, Hakka Finance | ETHTaipei 2023

next up is jumping from Parker Finance talking about playing with ethereum the map editor of electronic cache Haka Finance is a set of decentralized derivative and original financial instruments forming an all-inclusive ecosystem of tools that allow users to purchase Financial sovereignty that's welcome temping thank you can you hear me hey how okay hi everyone this is Ping and today I'm going to talk about playing with ethereum the map editor of electronic cash and I want to discuss the unique properties of ethereum that allows us to create custom games with real money and introduce some of the projects that I've built that explores explores this kind of intersections okay so um this is Ping and I'm the founder of Palace and Haka Finance which is a D5 brand and my journey starts from 2016. I used to be a uh ethereum minor once I was still in University and then I started to learn about smart contract coding and doing research of defy so first for for in terms of uh the term electronic cash it is in fact comes from the the original Bitcoin white paper Bitcoin appear to peer electronic cash system and that was the old days that the term blockchain didn't exist so the the purpose of Bitcoin to be built is to allow us to send money via the Internet and I guess many of you are quite familiar with this metaphor which is that Bitcoin as feature phone and ethereum as smartphone and this kind of analogy is often used to illustrate that uh the the the difference between Bitcoin and ethereum so Bitcoin is simple and it is specified for payment system and it is the very first blockchain technology thus ethereum is a all-powering platform that allowed users to build their own application on top of it while sharing uh the same secured infrastructure yeah and this also uh empowers people to build their own application on top of it which is quite similar with what you can do on let's say app stores on iPhone yeah and by writing smart contract we developers can have arbitrary business Logic on top of this blockchain and we can deal with real Financial value instead of just data so what is a map editor exactly a map editor is an extension of a video game that allows players to not only play with the content the dev created but also let them to have their own contents within the game like for example uh they can build their own Maps their own levels mods and even with a an entirely different gameplays that have a totally different uh objectives and there's many games that are famous with its map editors like for example Warcraft 3 like uh many mini games are built by its players instead of their original developers and there's a famous game called Dota 2 which started as a player made map in Warcraft 3 but eventually spin off to be a standalone game yeah and we also see Sandbox game like for example Minecraft which shares the similarity with map editor that it heavily relies on the content players create instead of what the dev have defined yeah and there's events some games that the entire game the the entire gameplay itself is a map editors like Roblox it is 100 customer generate content and then this is where ethereum comes in ethereum is at the intersection of electronic cash and map editor and has benefited from from both sides I mean from having the ability to be customized and the ability to handle cash flows yeah and I guess many of you already known ethereum as the so-called programmable money or nowadays we usually call it D5 the the money legal but if you understand that it is also a map editor that allows you to play with real money and this is something that traditional video game devs cannot do and this also opened up a unique opportunity for us to uh to build like a large scale so-called social experiment that I'm very certain that like economics and psychologists will Envy Us by a lot like you can have arbitrary experiments and have real incentives with real currency that usually very difficult to implement in real world and then I'm going to give some examples to shows how this kind of intersections happens by sharing some products that I have built and the first one will be black hole swap and black hole swap is a Dax that specializes for stable currencies so it's quite similar with curve but it is in fact based on the well-known uni swaps xyk constant product formula but undergoes a linear transformation to be the the Orange Line in the graph and since it is relatively simple like it is only doing a linear transformation so this already allows us to make a minimal tweak that with a huge differences in terms of uh how it works so this illustrates the the power of customization on top of existing products and the second one the second project I would like to assure is Haka intelligence it is another product I've built and it is a prediction Market that aiming to utilize the so-called uh collective intelligence of human yeah so this is a credential Market that players can submit their predictions with a stake and turns out to to gain profit or incur loss based on their accuracy yeah so here we can make prediction of some future events like for example the price of cryptocurrencies in the future so we asked people to make predictions and also put money on what they have predict and each submission is scored by the the cosine similarity of their summation and the actual outcome and and players will get private I mean they will get back their stake uh directly proportional to the accuracy times the stake they have Commit yeah and this mechanism does not realize on uh deep Market liquidity like what uh I guess ogre or poly Market relies on all you need to do is to be as accurate as possible and then you will get rewarded yeah and uh interestingly we found out that even though individuals tend to make bad guess summing up all the submissions from people surprisingly gives us a good Insight of what is going to happen in the future and this kind of nature is quite interesting and the third plot project I would like to introduce is she quite Mon and it is not live yet but since I think it's quite unique so I still want to share it with you in advance so this is an nft project with a marking nature that in this game we want to Grant privilege to players who have made bad Investments and what we do is we ask people to spend their so-called tree coins to meet and nft monsters and uh as long as their their coins price Falls their monster will become stronger so it's like the the opposite of uh how we have a sense of financial outcome yeah and these games mechanics mechanics reflects the the current trend of uh meme coin trading and the irrational hype that can drive their price up and down but uh ultimately fail and we want to let pet investor to have a sense of relief not on their financial status but on this interesting product yeah and here what I want to assure is uh you already can see the boundaries between Financial instrument and game blurs so you can consider it as applying the gamifying techniques on a serious Financial product or you can consider it as building a game but plugging in the ability to play with real money and these two different kind of mindsets uh inspired us to build new products and in the next part I'm going to share a real example of how can we learn from video games and try to apply the lesson we learned into blockchain so like for example Yesterday Once I was playing aoe2 I noticed an interesting phenomenon on building constructions like I want to build a castle on the hill and I find out that by applying villagers to making such a building it does not give me a linear uh increase in terms in terms of speed and I found out it was once I tripled the villagers involved I will get two times the speed so which means three villagers for 2X and 9 for 4X yeah and this this mechanism is interesting because it is not linear so it might be not so intuitive but remain reasonable and then the next step is to trying to apply this kind of mechanism to probably D5 or nft projects so how things get started first to gain more insights I first plot this formula on Georgia and have some uh brief observation on the Curve then I quickly realized that this formula could not be applied to address based write calculation like for example if I want to use it use this formula for the the voting power of token stakers then it won't work because since it is a sublinear function user will tend to split their stacks on multiple addresses to to take advantage of the system yeah and that is what exactly uh get coin quadratic funding have suffered from like we uh people tend to spam to have multiple identities and to donate to to to get privilege from the reward pool yeah but if we already have a reliable identity system like for example uh 10K nft projects then we can apply this mechanism on top of it yeah so what I'm considering for now is I probably can make a maybe token plus nft joint staking mechanism like what bayc have done on their something like that yeah or I can also probably consider to uh apply this kind of techniques on like the rate limit of a specific operation like maybe we can let our nft monsters to have a right limit of like maybe the battles they can join per day and once they stake more governance token on top of their each each of their token then the the limit will increase but it will be a sub linear function instead of directly proportional to how many tokens they have yeah so this is a real world examples of how can we learn from the games and some fascinating mechanism and try to turn those insights into Financial applications and in closing I would like to recall the topic so ethereum is indeed a map editor of electronic cache that helps you to create arbitrary you can call it games or applications that can alter a real Financial value but remain programmable yeah and also I would like to quote the famous uh uh anthropology book homo ludens which explores the the fundamental of the role of playing of human civilization yeah uh the the boundaries between playing games and financial products and human culture blurs and uh we as the ethereum developer is privileged to create such applications that we we can make custom games with real money and the the potential of innovative and creativity is maximized in this kind of environment and that does not exist in the past and that is what I want to emphasize and also as long as the as long as ethereum one of the most significant scale of human coordination machine continue to function the possibilities are endless yeah but just one reminder which is all of the application on top of blockchain especially ethereum will remain more or less related to financial or a sense of ownership yeah because we will need this kind of value to justify the nature that we'll need to pay guests for using the blockchain yeah so I think that is the only limit and nothing else yeah so we appreciate this kind of possibilities and I invite everyone to explore ethereum and Its a bright future and there's a plus one which is I've made a game with once I want to test out GitHub co-pilot which is a blockchain based 2048 game so uh it is totally Unchained and what you need to do is to write a solver like either in solidity or Viper and try to implement and uh an algorithm that can help you to make high score in this game and to make things more interesting I have already put like some some bounties on it like I guess it was uh 0.5 East and some metrics on the other blockchain yeah and your goal is to write this over and it will need to be an interactive solver that the the main program will pass in a game and a deck a board that represents the current state of the game and your software will need to uh replies with an operation like you want to go up or down or left or right yeah and by doing this recursively you will end up to have a score and the objective here is to create a solver that is able to make a high score but since it is fully untrained you will be limited by the gas spent yeah unless I'm certain that you cannot exit the blood gas limit which is 30 million guests on ethereum and like a few million on polygons yeah and what make things interesting is that the game is fully permissionless and by playing that game you are certain that as long as you are the highest uh the the player that gains the high score you are promised to get the Bounty yeah you don't need to trust the developer of the application and nor you need to trust that the the game is fair because it is uh fully open sourced and by building this kind of uh campaign in like that's a web 2 video games you are not allowed to have this kind of permissionlessness because you will more or less need to trust the operator of that so-called game but in on ethereum everything is permissionless yeah so you can check it by yourself and yeah there's some money for you to win if you have spare time maybe today or tomorrow then yeah I invite you to try to get the Bounty yeah and I'm sure the link down there or you can find uh ping Chen TW on Twitter then you will find that post and yeah that's it thanks for listening and I hope you enjoyed the talk any question from the audience hi can you talk more about Haka Finance new product like you mentioned before especially the relationship with your new product and the Age of Empire again thank you oh uh I guess you are referring to the examples I just gave for now uh I'm thinking of applying the the formula to maybe Chico and moon but Sugar Mountain itself is still under development so I I'm afraid I have I have not much thing to share for now to have other questions okay then thank you samping [Applause] okay so now we are going to take