Flare Friday: NFTs, Bridges, and Cross-chain Compatibility
In Greek mythology, it is the Titan Prometheus that steals fire for humanity, enabling civilization to survive the dark winters. In crypto-mythology, it is Flare that brings low fees to blockchains around the world. As you all know, we have recently partnered with Flare to resolve some of the issues of high gas fees presented by the Ethereum network. This morning, our CMO, Jason “BitBender” Brink, sat down with Hugo Philion of The Flare Network to discuss the Network and some of the functionality it may bring to the Gala Games Ecosystem in the future. This post is the first in an occasional series of “Flare Friday” posts to explore future collaboration between Gala Games and the Flare Network. These posts will not happen every week, but we will work hard to keep our combined communities informed of the trajectory of our development and the growth of our ecosystems.
One of the favorite topics when there is a fresh drop of NFTs is the “OMG, these gas fees are INSANE!” when an attempt to mint the NFTs to a users wallet. We, as a team, understand this and feel your pain very acutely. This was why we connected with Flare, as we see their base layer solution as being able to fundamentally help solve this issue. To help users understand how this will work with the Flare Network, it is important to understand some basic components of the Flare Network itself. Flare works by other blockchains to determine what changes have been made, and performing certain actions on the Flare Network to mirror those changes. This is done via a “State Connector” which is operated by the decentralized system of Flare Nodes. In this way, Flare establish oversight and monitoring capabilities over chains such as XRP, Doge, Litecoin, and others. This means that if something happens on these chains, and it meets certain criteria, the Flare Network will respond in the way in which it has been programmed.
There have been many questions about what this really means for Gala Games. How might this work for NFTs issued with the Gala Games ecosystem? Could this potentially solve the issue of runaway gas fees keeping you from claiming items from your Treasure Chest?
Good news! If your NFT has not yet been minted, it will be very easy for you to mint the tokens directly to the Flare Network once the Gala Games Ecosystem has been integrated with Flare. As the Flare Network is Ethereum Virtual Machine compatible, the smart contracts which are deployed for the NFTs will be virtually identical, regardless of whether the NFT resides on Ethereum or Flare. Once it is on the Flare Network, you will be able to interact with it in the same ways as you would with any other asset, the only difference is that it would be much faster and cost little or nothing to send.
Moving an already existing Ethereum asset to the Flare Network is equally simple, it simply requires that the NFT in question be sent to a specific address within the Ethereum network, which will burn the item and initiate a minting transaction on Flare. While this initial transaction to migrate an asset from Ethereum to Flare would have a ETH gas bill attached to it, once that migration has taken place, it will be just as easy for you to send it as it is for people to send anything else on the Flare Network.
“From a game development perspective, it will be just as easy for us to check to make sure that an item exists in someone’s inventory based on Flare as it would be on Ethereum,” says Gala Games Studio Director Michael McCarthy. “What is important to us is maintaining the best possible player experience.”
Supply limits between all chains will be maintained by an oracle distributed across the Gala Games Nodes. Ultimately, the Gala Games team envisions this serving as an oracle that will connect multiple chains and protocols. At the end of the day, we want to build a combined and growing ecosystem that can enable gamers to own their content however they want. As it was excellently put by Hugo Philion, “this is a global shift in the way people envision the world — a way of coming together to have combined economic endeavors.”
We are at the beginning of a great revolution in gaming, ownership, and how people interact with the global economy. Blockchain is fundamentally changing the world, and gaming is going to be what brings it to the masses.
For a much more technical explanation of the Flare Network, please see the Flare Network whitepaper here: https://flare.xyz/app/uploads/2020/08/flare_v1.1.pdf
About Flare
The Flare network is the first Turing complete smart contract network to use Federated Byzantine Agreement (FBA) consensus. This allows Flare to have fast inexpensive transactions and unlike other scaling methods does not need to base network safety on value. This allows Flare to scale for arbitrary value without facing capital constraints and importantly allows Flare’s native token, Spark (FLR), to be used for other productive purposes. Flare brings utility to other networks by enabling their tokens to be used on Flare with Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) based smart contracts.. XRP, LTC and Dogecoin are currently slated for integration with Flare. Many more tokens can potentially be added. As a Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM)-compatible blockchain solution, Flare can dramatically lower the costs associated with NFT minting and transactions whilst opening up previously unavailable communities.
Find out more about Flare at www.flare.xyz
