Decentralization poker game Insta-Pok3r leads the new trend of blockchain games

Since the beginning of 2024, the blockchain gaming industry has experienced a financing boom, with over 20 projects successfully raising a cumulative total of over $100 million. A major South Korean gaming giant has partnered with a public blockchain to launch a Web3 version of a well-known game, marking a deep integration of traditional gaming with blockchain technology, and opening new paths for innovation and development in the entire gaming industry. In the wave of blockchain technology, the characteristics of security, transparency, and decentralization offer new possibilities for online gaming. Recently, a new type of blockchain game called Insta-Pok3r has garnered widespread attention in the industry, enabling real-time, secure, and trustless online poker games through encryption technology, and its potential impact on existing online poker games should not be underestimated.

Insta-Pok3r is a decentralized online poker game system designed to address the trust and fairness issues present in traditional online poker games. It generates verifiable random shuffles by providing distributed services to multiple parties through the generation of relevant randomness, where each party's output is private but can be publicly verified, ensuring the randomness and fairness of the cards in the poker game.

The innovation of this system lies in its ability to allow users to play online poker in real-time environments at low costs, without relying on any trusted third parties. This is supported by a committee of computing providers who run a multiparty computation (MPC) protocol that generates an encrypted permutation of a deck of cards in advance during an offline phase where player identities are unknown.

The core of Insta-Pok3r lies in its unique MPC protocol and the newly proposed Simple Verifiable Multi-Identity Encryption (SVME). Before the game starts, the MPC server collaborates in an offline phase to generate a deck encryption arrangement based on Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) and produces a proof to demonstrate that the IBE ciphertext encodes a valid arrangement. In the online phase, players can request their IBE decryption keys and use these keys to decrypt their cards, a process that has relatively low computational costs.

The offline sampling process includes three steps: secret sharing of random unit roots, conflict checking, encryption, and proof. The MPC server first generates secret shares of many random values, and by using multiplication operations and reconstruction, ultimately obtains a large deck of cards. To eliminate duplicate cards, the server calculates the pseudo-random function of the cards, checks for conflicts through a distributed PRF protocol, and ultimately obtains a non-duplicate arrangement of 52 cards. Finally, the deck is encrypted using the distributed SVME encryption protocol, and an SVME encryption and proof tuple is generated and submitted to the Blockchain.

The online retrieval process includes three steps: player request, key computation and aggregation, key acquisition, and decryption. When players join the game, they make a request on the chain to obtain the IBE decryption key. Keypers receive the request, compute partial keys, and collaborate to aggregate them, submitting the aggregated decryption key to the chain. Players acquire the corresponding decryption key and ciphertext, and then decrypt their cards locally.

SVME is a key innovation in Insta-Pok3r that extends the existing concept of verifiable encryption, allowing for encryption on a multi-identity basis while keeping the size of the proof constant. This means that even in cases of multi-party participation, verifying the validity of the encrypted content does not require excessive resources.

The structure of SVME includes an IBE-based multi-identity key encryption scheme, polynomial commitment, proof technology, and a new succinct sigma proof system for connecting commitment and encryption. By using SVME, the Insta-Pok3r system can allow anyone to verify whether the distribution of cards is fair while protecting the privacy of the cards, ensuring fairness in the game.

The emergence of Insta-Pok3r poses a challenge to existing online poker platforms. Traditional online poker platforms often rely on centralized servers and algorithms to ensure the fairness of the game, but this model carries the risk of being hacked or cheating by the platform. Insta-Pok3r, on the other hand, achieves true decentralization and transparency through Blockchain technology and multi-party computation, greatly enhancing the security and fairness of the game.

For example, SVME and IBE ensure the confidentiality and fairness of the cards before they are dealt. Only players with the correct key can decrypt and see their own cards, while other players or third parties cannot obtain information about these cards. At the same time, through technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs, the system can prove that the distribution of cards is in accordance with the rules without revealing specific card information, thus ensuring the fairness of the game.

The application of this encryption technology not only prevents players from cheating but also enhances players' trust in the game, promoting the development of online poker games. The Insta-Pok3r system demonstrates the innovative application of blockchain technology in the field of online poker games, providing a great example of the development of blockchain technology in the gaming sector.

Although the Insta-Pok3r system addresses trust and fairness issues in online poker games to some extent, the system's performance and efficiency still need further improvement. For example, the system requires a certain amount of time and computational resources during the generation of random arrangements and the encryption process, which may affect the player's gaming experience. In the future, it is necessary to enhance the performance and efficiency of the Blockchain system through optimization algorithms, improved hardware performance, and other methods to meet the demands of practical applications.

Insta-Pok3r, as a successful attempt of Blockchain technology in the online gaming field, demonstrates the potential of Blockchain technology in enhancing game fairness and security. The emergence of blockchain games will change the business model of the gaming industry by introducing cryptocurrency and smart contracts, making transactions between players simple, secure, and transparent. Players can earn cryptocurrency or virtual assets through the game and trade both in-game and out of the game, achieving a more equitable distribution of benefits between players and developers.

Blockchain technology has brought revolutionary changes to the gaming industry, addressing issues such as unclear ownership and high replicability of virtual items in traditional games. Through the immutability of Blockchain, players can ensure the uniqueness and immutability of virtual assets, thereby giving real value to virtual items. With the continuous development and improvement of technology, we have reason to believe that more interesting innovative blockchain games will emerge in the future.