Proposal Overview
Dark Forest is a space-conquest game built on Ethereum where players discover and conquer planets in an infinite, procedurally-generated, cryptographically-specified universe. It uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate game moves on Ethereum without sharing information with other players about the moves.
Use Case
The game is currently on Ethereum and xDai and there is a need to port the game to Harmony which is an EVM compatible chain with very low gas cost that will benefit the players of the game. The Harmony ecosystem is also very well suited for the game not only because of the low gas cost but also the existence of hundreds of other games with thousands of gamers operating within the ecosystem.
Based on this, we’ve studied the existing source code of the game and have created an initial port to the Harmony Testnet environment as shown in this link (Feel free to reach out to us to whitelist your wallet address if you would like to test the game). We have also reached out to some of the core DF developers to support us in porting the game fully on Harmony and setting up competitions for the gaming ecosystem
Competitive Landscape
Currently, Harmony being a layer 1 EVM chain with very low gas fees is home to several games such as DeFi Kingdom, MarsColony, Freyala, and so on however we still don’t have any Dark forest flavoured game on the chain. Based on this, there is a rare opportunity to bring Dark Forest to the ecosystem and leveraging on the unique membership of zkDAO, we can properly run and maintain the game.
Proposal Ask
The DarkForest application fork on Harmony will be established to be community-driven and self-funded by the DAO (to be created) in a bid to bring a ZK powered space conquest game to the Harmony Blockchain. To get this up and running, we will be requesting the $15k/year stable basic income to take care of initial development, welfare and operations costs.
This ask will be in line with the laid down milestones as detailed below
- launching a feature-complete product on our testnet
- forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs
- launching on our mainnet with audit
- attracting 1k daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion)
- attracting 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process)
Our public road map
| Objective | Date | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Testnet launch | April 27th | Done |
| Beta Testing and Fixes | June 19th | Pending |
| Smart Contract Audit | June 26th | Pending |
| Mainnet Launch | Jul 3rd | Pending |
External links
DarkForest Testnet Application
Dark Forest Contract
Screenshots
Team
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Kousik Rajesh is a final year bachelor’s degree student in Computer Science at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati India. He is a cryptography and zero-knowledge enthusiast keen on pursuing a Master’s degree in the same. He is currently a TA at ZKU.
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Tosin Shada is a software engineer at a leading bank in Africa and currently a TA at ZKU with expertise and interest in Web3, Zero Knowledge and Blockchain technologies. He is also very interested in launching ZK focused products.