Cartesi Showcases the Potential of Blockchain Gaming with Decentralized Poker

Away from the ever-increasing DDOS attacks, server outages and cheating in the online gaming world, Cartesi’s tech cannot be taken offline or manipulated

The gaming industry is predicted to be worth over $256 billion by 2025 and, as millions of users around the globe play against each other in almost every way imaginable, more hours are spent gaming online than ever before. But the massive centralized game servers that store and control everything that keeps the games alive have unfortunately proved to be increasingly unreliable; server outages, security breaches and physical fires at some of the largest server farms have seen countless hours of downtime and millions of dollars worth of purchased and earned in-game items lost forever.

Blockchain technology has the power to solve many of the issues prevalent within the gaming industry, by distributing game servers and hosting games on immutable platforms that cannot be manipulated or shut down. Now Cartesi, a layer-2 blockchain platform that enables millions of traditional developers around the world to build and run decentralized applications on Linux operating systems, has unveiled a decentralized poker game that represents a breakthrough achievement for blockchain applications.

Cheaters, hackers and outages

Today’s biggest online games rely on centralized servers, controlled by a handful of industry giants. As we’ve seen plenty of times, having a single point of failure (especially when large amounts of user data is involved) never ends well and it leaves games open to all sorts of attacks and technical problems.

DDOS attacks have plagued games such as Apex Legends; Grand Theft Auto has recently suffered prolonged downtime due to server outages, and many players of popular games such as CS:GO have been frustrated by continued cheating made possible by centralized gaming infrastructure.

Cartesi’s fully decentralized poker game demo showcase, being built atop of the Polygon blockchain, promises to tackle the problems, when fully deployed,  caused by centralized server outages and also the issue of cheating that has become ever-present in the professional online gaming world, today valued at around $1 billion. In recent years, various high profile cheating scandals in online poker particularly have highlighted the cracks in current gaming models.

A safer, fairer way to play

Cartesi’s decentralized poker game uses LibTMCG, a software library that enables data privacy for online card games, alongside Cartesi’s Descartes SDK. The Cartesi team has introduced this game to showcase what is possible with Cartesi technology, the proposed architecture of which allows for the development of a wide variety of turn-based games, from chess to complex battle strategy games, with mainstream software stacks.

Cartesi’s tools mean that turn-based games can now be built on blockchains without needing to code only on  Solidity; the predominant programming language for Ethereum, Solidity is not widely used in the tradition software development world and hence has created a barrier to entry for many developers looking to work in the blockchain industry.

Having already welcomed several new members to the team this year, Cartesi is now inviting developers everywhere to build with tools available on the Cartesi platform with grants available from Cartesi Labs. 

“We’ve essentially created a bridge from the blockchain industry to the traditional software developer world.” says Erick de Moura, Cartesi CEO. “Now anyone can build a decentralized, cheat-proof and censor-proof game on Ethereum or another blockchain, using their trusted language and working with the battle-tested Linux tools that they’re used to.”

Source: https://coinquora.com/cartesi-showcases-the-potential-of-blockchain-gaming-with-decentralized-poker/