Ethereum Founder Urges Against Following the Latest DeFi Trends, Instead Calls Fans to Play Real-Time Strategy Game "Dark Forest"

DeFi has been dominating the cryptocurrency market since mid-year. Besides various liquidity mining and governance tokens being released, Ethereum has been suffering from congestion on the chain. Transaction fees have been soaring since May, almost more than double the peak during the ICO boom in January 2018. In response to these developments, the founder of Ethereum once again urged users not to "follow the trend."

Tokens like CRV from Curve, the overnight sensation Yam Finance, and YFI from yearn.finance, which is dubbed as the Bitcoin of the DeFi space, have all gained significant attention. This wave of excitement has reminded many investors of the glory days of ICOs. However, it remains uncertain whether DeFi will eventually go mainstream or end up as a short-lived trend like token fundraising.

Vitalik Emphasizes Again: No Need to Participate in the Latest DeFi

Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin has repeatedly warned about the risks associated with DeFi, including:

• Interest rates much higher than traditional finance, which may indicate undisclosed risks unless it's temporary arbitrage.
• Long-term DeFi projects should not outperform the best traditional financial products.
• Systemic risks may exist and are difficult to estimate or predict.
• The possibility of smart contract vulnerabilities.

He previously stated at the end of July, "DeFi is still good, but it shouldn't be hyped as a great place for the average person to put their life savings into." Recently, he reiterated:

Remember, you don't need to play the latest, hottest DeFi projects to participate in Ethereum. Unless you truly understand the mechanisms of these projects, the best approach may be to be an observer or to play with money you can afford to lose.

Vitalik emphasizes that DeFi is not all of Ethereum; there are still many Ethereum-based DApps. One game that has recently caught his interest is a blockchain game called "Dark Forest."

Real-Time Strategy Game - Dark Forest

Dark Forest is a decentralized real-time strategy (RTS) game built on zero-knowledge proofs "zkSNARKS." Its name is inspired by one of China's best-selling science fiction novels, the second book in the trilogy "The Three-Body Problem II: Dark Forest", written by the first Chinese Hugo Award winner, Liu Cixin.

The story depicts the negotiations between humans and the alien "Trisolarans." Facing the priority of survival, the aliens seek to destroy Earth's civilization and settle on Earth, while global scientific and cultural elites unite to resist the alien civilization for the future of Earth and humanity.

Players are born into an infinite universe generated by algorithms and cryptography. Similar to popular classic strategy games like "Age of Empires," "StarCraft," and "Warcraft," players initially continue to grow their population and gather resources in the universe. As their fleet grows larger, they can explore and conquer neighboring planets (players).

War Fog Built with Zero-Knowledge Proofs

In the vast universe, players are shrouded in a war fog, where the game map areas remain hidden until players explore them. Therefore, players are completely unaware of the conditions in other universes. While a war fog may be common in traditional games, establishing hidden information like a war fog setting is challenging for public blockchains where data is typically transparent.

"Dark Forest" achieves the war fog through a decentralized mechanism using cryptography. By employing zero-knowledge proofs, even the game developers cannot know what the universe under the war fog looks like.

Dark Forest utilizes zkSNARKs, where players publicly submit verifiable and effective actions while maintaining privacy. The essence of zero-knowledge proofs is that players can submit to the chain: "I want to move from universe A to universe B, and I can prove that I indeed moved to universe B." However, the game developers and validators still cannot determine the exact locations of universes A and B. Therefore, even checking the "Dark Forest" contract does not reveal the actual positions of other players. The only way is to proceed step by step.

As of now, the seven-day test version v0.3 has successfully concluded, with players completing 140,000 transactions and conquering nearly 40,000 planets. Just the verification of zero-knowledge proofs alone has cost over 7,000 Ether. Twitter user @hideandcleanse achieved a dominating performance, nearly three times the score of the second-place winner, and received a reward of 1,024 DAI.

The Dark Forest team plans to develop more features, including economic mechanisms and more diverse (and deadly) cosmic environments. At this stage, interested individuals can register on the whitelist to participate in the next game round.