The blockchain gaming financing boom Insta-Pok3r leads a new paradigm in online poker.

Since the beginning of 2024, the blockchain gaming industry has welcomed a wave of financing. More than 20 blockchain game projects have successfully secured funding, with a total amount exceeding 100 million USD. A South Korean gaming giant has collaborated with a public chain to launch the Web3 version of NXPC, marking a deep integration of traditional gaming and blockchain technology, paving 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 chain game called Insta-Pok3r has caught widespread attention in the industry. This game utilizes encryption technology to achieve a real-time, secure online poker experience without the need for a trusted third party, which may have a significant impact on existing online poker games.

Insta-Pok3r is a decentralized online poker game system designed to address the trust and fairness issues present in traditional online poker games. It provides distributed services for multiple parties by generating relevant randomness, creating verifiable random shuffles. 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 Insta-Pok3r lies in its ability to allow users to play online poker in real-time environments at a low cost, without relying on any trusted third parties. This is supported by a committee of computing providers who run a multi-party computation (MPC) protocol that generates an (identity-based) encrypted 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 Simplified Verifiable Multi-identity Encryption (SVME). Before the game starts, the MPC server collaboratively generates a deck encryption arrangement based on Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) during the offline phase, and produces a PLONK-style proof to demonstrate that the IBE ciphertext encodes a valid arrangement. During 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 online retrieval process includes three steps: player requests, key calculation and aggregation, key acquisition, and decryption.

SVME is a key innovation in Insta-Pok3r that expands the existing concept of verifiable encryption, allowing for encryption based on multiple identities 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 resource consumption.

The structure of SVME includes a multi-identity based encryption (MIBE) scheme based on Boneh-Franklin IBE, KZG polynomial commitments, Plonk proof technology, and a new concise sigma proof system for connecting commitments 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 the fairness of 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 fairness in the game, but this model carries the risk of being hacked or manipulated by the platform itself. 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 access this card information. At the same time, through technologies like zero-knowledge proofs, the system can demonstrate that the distribution of cards complies with the rules without disclosing 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 for the development of blockchain technology in the gaming sector.

Although the Insta-Pok3r system addresses some trust and fairness issues in online poker games, the system's performance and efficiency still need further improvement. For example, the system requires a certain amount of time and computing resources to generate random arrangements and encryption, which may affect the gaming experience for players. This all needs to be improved through optimizing algorithms, enhancing hardware performance, and other means to enhance the performance and efficiency of the Blockchain system 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 inside and outside 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 of virtual items and high replicability in traditional games. Through the immutability of blockchain, players can ensure the uniqueness and immutability of virtual assets, thus granting 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.