100% fully on-chain decentralized poker

Transcript

we good oh all right hey welcome guys thanks for being here it's a lot of you uh cool uh so we're here ECC right cart studio um you're wondering well ZK hold of my thought right so card studio is actually the makers behind ZK hold them so let's get into it um first we're building the on-chain card and board game layer for all of web 3 okay so what does that mean we'll get into it but first who am I so my name is Michael Rippy uh that's me in the picture uh and I'm right here so I'm the chief Communications officer at ZK Holdem and a little bit about me that means I handle Communications

Partnerships um Business Development a little bit of everything I think everyone kind of understands how it works here uh when you work at a company uh where am I from my web 2 location Los Angeles California so it's a long way from here but glad to be here uh I went to school for for uh business uh Syracuse University if anyone's familiar uh wonderful School learned a lot in business and also Communications one of the best communication schools in the world um what have I done in my past that makes me qualified or at least I think I'm qualified to be here right now uh I started I was gaming Ambassador actually for Oculus prior to even Facebook uh buying them or meta these days um I also was a portfolio associate on Wall Street at newberger Berman and then further I did Global Communications at

Lexus so I was in the Auto industry for a while as well and then I've been passionate about cryptocurrency blockchain before it was even titled web3 for years I had a company investorally helping to uh Empower people that didn't know about crypto to invest early in it it was a lot easier than when there was like four cryptos and there wasn't much else to worry about uh it's gotten more challenging obviously lots of different areas like gaming um so uh what am I I'm a blockchain evangelist a technology Enthusiast and I love poker so it's a perfect kind of role and I'm excited to talk to you guys today about what we're doing and why so trying to innovate to kind of improve uh the tech on the technology and then

Inspire to create some impact across the world so ZK hold them right we're at the intersection of gaming and the blockchain which is super exciting and so we are a ZK snark based Texas Hold'em game and you can see a screenshot right there of the game it is the first ever fully on-chain poker game you hear a lot about poker on the blockchain but it's really off the chain brought onto the chain ZK Oldham is completely on chain so obviously that is exciting and brings with it a whole set of challenges so let's talk about kind of what we're doing we got three major focuses today here opportunity the technology and kind of the gaming studio that we are because we actually are more than just CK Holdem

but the opportunity huge market for gaming and using the Innovation we can get there what's that market size look like well right now game five is less than one million people worldwide poker alone has a hundred million users online and then for example magic the game 40 million users worldwide so huge opportunity uh excited to tap into that market but of course there's a huge problem right and this is why we're trying to change that when you type in online poker online anywhere uh you come up with the word scam rigged cheating there is no fairness there isn't really trust and the idea of God mode has been played out before and you know just some

quick screen grabs we can see uh of course there was the scandals from fulltail poker uh you know there was Ultimate bet you can go on YouTube and see all of the different uh videos talking about is online poker rigged and more importantly you can play yourself and wonder am I getting a fair game I always ask people if they play online you know what's your feeling whether or not it's just because you're not that good or something you always feel like somehow some reason someone knows your cards uh and it doesn't seem right so we can kind of solve that and we can do that by bringing the imperfect information games on Chain by using the fairness and trust and redefining an entire genre and that's actually more

than just let's say poker uh you know we're talking about obviously these are trading card games but tradition on strategy games auto chat social deduction games and a lot more that we can do using zkp speaking of zkp the technology this leads into the Innovation so zero knowledge proofs maybe you know maybe you don't you've probably heard it feels like it's a hot name and a Hot Topic inside of blockchain these days but just a refresher it's crypto cryptographic protocol allowing the prover to prove to a verifier that they have the knowledge of a particular piece of information without revealing the information itself super important and it makes a lot of sense when you think about the cards that you'd be hand uh you know holding in a poker game zkp's work by allowing

the prover to demonstrate the validity of a statement proving your cards without revealing any additional information about the statement so they can't know your cards but they can know that your cards are there um there's you know there's tons of research on this stuff even higher level than I could talk about but really mental poker is kind of how our chief technologists and scientists developed our uh Shuffle technology and so it's really about how to dishonest players play an online game of poker without needing to trust one another I would highly recommend if anyone is interested to dive into that specific research and learn a little bit more about it our solution at ZK Holdem is the ZK Shuffle this is really what powers ZK Holden and

can power other games uh you know tcgs and stuff Three core functions of ZK Shuffle which is a smart contract for a decentralized fair private dealer enabled fully untrained uh card games so the way we do that is there's three basic uh key functions we have the ZK Shuffle the setup this is all on the smart contract where each player is going to generate a private secret key pair collectively generate an aggregated public key and using all of players Publix Key then you encrypt the technology and this is how you Shuffle the deck that you're going to use to play that game of Holdem and then every player will take their turn to call the shuffle encrypt and then conversely you'll deal the cards to each player by

each person uh decrypting that same function so that's how you get this dealing of uh cards that are completely uh using the zkbt uh technology and so if you want to learn a little bit more not too small I thought might be a little bit too small but you can actually see so in this example we have Alice Bob and Charlie this is really how it works specifically uh quick six six steps so each card has three locks after the round of encryption and you can see let's say in this example Alice fetches the encrypted card and and then decrypts using our secret key then she then submits that decrypted card on chain along with his ekp for the validity of the decryption following that Bob then

fetches that partially decrypted card and from there Alice on chain decrypts the card using his secret key and then after Bob is decrypted it continues he submits the decrypted card over to Charlie the zero ZK APF proof validity and decryption on chain and then Charlie does the same so he fetches the information with only his lock-on chain and he can use his secret card to see his card uh secret key the keys here are uh amazing to think about but really here's some of the the impediments or some of the challenges that we face and how we get it done so really we're combining high performance with low cost these are some of the speeds if you're really into detail we use homomorphic encryption which is

ensuring the sequence of uh encryption and decryption uh not affecting the final result but we used the graph 16 proof system with circon language you can see kind of the proof in the time frame uh and then some of the constraints it's a little bit more technical but some of the game stats we've already used let's get into some of the stats here uh you know these are a little bit outdated at this point because we've been improving and we've been moving forward with uh the product but five to ten seconds per dealing and this was tested and used on arbitrary Nova depending on the number of players of course and then the gas per game was about uh 10 cents and then conversely our community has grown quite considerably quickly uh to over 12 000

people in our Discord and 50 000 members are following us on Twitter and playing which we just uh has a first week test net participation with over 90 000 individual participating addresses and then 45 000 individual visiting IPS which was super exciting for us uh and over 16 000 games played in the first week of the test net which we uh have launched a couple test Nets different chains um what is the long-term goal at card studio and for more you know importantly not just CK Holdem is we want to be the decentralized card game platform uh so that's ZK Holdem as our first game and then other games as well and and I'll debut a quick teaser of a second game

that we're coming out with shortly uh towards the end but just a thought you can think about games that this could that we can use our ZK Shuffle to make and you can think about games like magic Hearthstone Uno uh and there's a lot more of course we want to make sure we get ZK hold them correct first before we go on to longer term goals um here I actually want to show you guys a quick uh two minute demo of the actual uh game um let me see here if I can get this video to work hopefully okay perfect so here this is a demo of

actually zkhold now if you are a holder of let's say an NFC project or one of our uh Community Partners you can actually log in and create a specific room that's customized to let's say your nft project your D5 protocol if you wanted a specific poker table this is your base case uh ZK Holdem kind of uh table um so you know no backgrounds no pfps you know just simplistic model but this is you you've signed in you're now at the table ready to play you kind of can see the game this is our an early version uh and and here you can kind of see what is going to happen here this is going to be a social chat while also watching your balances someone has joined the game and uh the beauty you know so you've bought your chips uh

you're in the beauty of the game is that you don't have to do anything for transactions each each you know card once you're in the in the game you have a like hot wallet a femoral account we call it which will have the ability to to make your transactions process smoothly without you having to click anything it will do it automatically so here you can see you can play uh you know here we have a heads up example and you can see this is working entirely like the way it works if you go to a centralized site at any point here you're seeing that our user is you know this is your cards you've got a seven and an eight you're playing against person you can see your pot you can see how all of the functions are built into

the game and watching the flow onto the chain uh the success the pending and you can see kind of the the either the quickness or how long it will take your options as you know the cards are being dealt so you obviously have your whole cards and now you have the Flop and you get to choose you know your raise your fold your call all of the game all of the functions that you see in a standard centralized site right here now this is completely on the blockchain which is what is exciting right because you don't have to be concerned can somebody else know my cards like we've seen in the past obviously you've now hit an eight so you have a pair it's telling you sure what not this is uh completely reminder like I said as we watch each transaction

going through right here in the bottom left uh really exciting to see that this is kind of our basic version too so you can imagine if let's say you're an nft holder you're a protocol holder and you wanted to have a community game it's not just going to look like you're you're not just playing poker but you're gonna be playing poker on the blockchain but also you could have your entire environment gaming wise as the background you can be using a you know your pfp uh some image that you'd like you can load in you can have the table customized in any version that you'd like and so here you see the winning uh hand how it's announced boom that's one quick demo example uh that we did probably maybe a few weeks ago we

created that uh if you're actually like hey I would love to do that myself and I would love to play the beauty is you're going to be able to do that um today uh not in here unfortunately but today you're going to be able to do that um let me see if I can get this to go back out um give me one second to just make sure it's hard because I'm in I don't read French okay

put it back to the presentation mode without the side just the presentation yeah perfect yo so the gaming studio part uh it's around the blockchain and The Innovation so we're here but how did we get here it's kind of important to kind of think about our timeline here so let's look back we'll adjust some of the Milestones that we've hit November of 2022 so almost a year ago now but we demoed at East San Francisco hackathon and we won a number of awards

and prizes from eight point best integration uh ens integration Bounty uh from scale best metaverse gaming nfts optimism best Bedrock op stack some others that was really exciting and that kind of started us on this journey that we've taken which started with a UI revamp at the start of this year in January and then moved to our first MVP which was on Arboretum Gurley at the start of February of this year and we fast forward because we've been hard at work uh the devs and the team to launch on Linea test net which was just about a month ago now obviously Linea is pretty popular these days uh recently at least and so we we launched on there uh just about a month ago and it was amazing because in those first nine days 25 000

games were played on their test net which is uh given us a lot of good testing feedback a lot of good capabilities to understand what we need to to improve on and iterate on and continue to to work to make the the game not just playable but exciting right because at the end of the day we need to make your ability to play poker on the blockchain essentially just same as playing poker not on the blockchain so that you don't even know you're on the blockchain really is the idea uh July 6th we launched our role of beta and then now we're here today just a couple weeks later finally talking about the the the the product uh at ECC so it's exciting um and then a little bit kind of further out the journey uh which we had private rooms starting last month

uh that you could play as you can hold them game Flow kind of being built in uh this month uh we're gonna be introducing the tokenomics and the tournament Edition right where you can play in tournaments and stuff uh later this summer as we unveil V2 version two really of ZK hold them we'll uh come out next month or so as we continue to add some features to the game some of those customized backgrounds will add some more skins in and make it much more experience much more enjoyable of the experience from a UI perspective in ux as I said in the tournament which is going to be really exciting because you could play uh General tournaments tournaments against the communities that maybe you already play poker with and then conversely uh we'll move forward and towards later this year we plan to

do to uh some other versions of kind of card games around poker and heads up and kind of war and some some fun stuff and then later at the end of this year is when we're going to do our tge and airdrop so a token uh is in play here to come later in the year which will have actually a dual uh model and I'll get to that in a second this isn't too important but I just want to share a little bit of kind of like how we think about this go to market uh one is to talk to people get out there outside of the digital world and get to the physical places like here uh but really we we introduced the the the game in Austin uh at consensus in the states

which was fun we're partnering with a ton of communities across the landscape from D5 projects that want to just have some branding or uh getting out their protocols launching on a bunch of different um uh test Nets to to get the experiences that we need to work on the game and then at the same time hosting in real life poker tournaments so that people that are in real life can kind of learn about ZK Holdem as you see we got a little bit stuff left some swag uh got really some some sweet cards that just kind of bring in people that maybe are not used to playing uh you know online but specifically not in the blockchain but giving them another opportunity to get involved and so we have some fun stuff coming as we continue uh to move

forward you probably think like how do we think about the money aspect or how do we make it continue to be successful uh longer term and so kind of Revenue model looks like three different ways right now from a ticket fee to a service fee to in-game items so kind of like the tournaments are one way that we think about this royalties from community events uh in style in so much as the service uh fee um you know obviously when you play poker there's rakes and stuff we don't plan to necessarily take that off the top we want to get people in to use the game and experience it and then in-game purchases right there can be vanity items that we could create that we can add into the game to make it more enjoyable as you're sitting at a table playing different hands and then I

talked about later this year we plan a token launch of some sort we're still working on it but the way we look at this is like a dual economy uh to to you know two two sides and so first ZK Holdem we have the utility token which is chips it's non-transferable erc20 used in the game and you can have a daily free claim so it can be used for proof of participation so you playing some hands and then also we're thinking about the idea of proof of skill right so some people like to play poker because they're really good some people like to play it because they they want to have fun they want to get better so there's sort of two ways that you could look at the chips utility token where proof of participation you're playing a lot of hands you're earning some of the

token at the same time we're getting some good feedback on what is working what is meeting Improvement and then larger side think about the the cards token which is like an ecosystem token as I said card Studio an entire ecosystem with multiple games multiple things going on this is more of a governance token an in-game currency uh and a revenue sharing possibility so this is one of the really exciting parts of uh what we're doing specifically because everyone is here to hear about ZK hold them in poker but if you play poker online you may be playing other games online and you may be interested in playing other games online so that's really uh a really fun thing some of the communities that we've partnered with and this is just a few of them actually

at this point but pretty pretty awesome I mean the eth lizards arbitrum easy swap length three Linea Caldera blade Dao the key is that we're trying to be uh you know kind of agnostic to communities we want to be around all the communities whether it's as I have talked about nfts D5 any Community we want to work to make it a more enjoyable experience to help kind of Empower web3 and the idea of the technology that you're using because one of the things I've learned in my experience especially around communities and crypto and blockchains a lot of poker players a lot of people like to play poker uh whether it's inside of a project having nightly

games weekly games whether it's here at a physical conference I know there's poker games going on I've been invited to sub myself and so we're really interested in in the Community Partnership so if anyone is in here right now in a community and is interested in setting something up with us would be happy to to talk more about that but really it's been a pleasure to work with some of these communities we are often doing things now uh digitally uh and by that I mean like in the in our Discord on Twitter to do amas to talk to these projects to learn more about the projects while also showcasing what we can do together and so here's a quick little example of some of our partners and some of the tables that we've already created customized skin Wise from the left this is the lucky ducky

community and so this is kind of their environment they've got I guess lily pads there each of the the players has got their pfp up there the cards are customized for lucky ducky and then as you move forward this is the eth lizards uh community and then we've been actually creating some mock-ups some other bigger projects that you could see like a Zuki Community the the board Apes the mutant Apes uh and and you can see how these environments match the environments that these projects live in and so the beauty is we can keep creating these in fact we don't even need to create them designer developer teams from these projects can can can create them and so there's a lot that we can develop and and build out and you

can just see even the detail whether it's from the basic demo that I showed you through to like social chat layers that can be built into the game the different designs and how it's it's really unique so this is really kind of the evolution of how we will continue to move forward and you can see that there's really customizable areas all across the entire interface which is super exciting because that part uh is kind of easy to do it's the back end which is pretty impossible as far as creating the on-chain game experience for Texas hold them just the zoomed in version in case you couldn't see but here's the eth lizards one of our first launch partners and this is their table playing a game uh really fun and you can

see why maybe if you're in one of these communities that's playing regularly on you know a centralized site and you don't get to use your avatar and it's it's what not you may be more inclined or more intrigued by this option or think about when you start the merging of different projects in a tournament or you're at uh you know a table with different pfps and you can see how it sort of takes that web3 ethos and brings it all together one more this is the lucky ducky one zoomed in you can see the the detail is is wild I mean even from the cards that they're being dealt uh so it's really cool to see where we've come this is our team outside of me that's not here right now these are

some of our co-founders uh Arnold seven years senior game designer and producer at tencent he shipped the 10 cent Texas Hold'em in in international version uh which is really exciting he's uh incredibly smart and uh is able to put together all of the new designs and everything very quickly of course Henry another co-founder formerly from parallel finance and also Paris space in Tokamak and then Bruno who is our cryptography he's got a PhD ex Facebook it's really the one that has designed the smart contract and does all of the stuff that I have no idea how he does it so big shout out to uh to Bruno and stuff and and this is the fun part I know we're here right now and I showed

you a demo that we we you know created just for this moment but if you want to actually uh demo uh and play a hand a few hands of ZK Holden today you can we are going to be at ZK Day from the Manta network uh and I think that's going on right now actually started uh through 8 P.M today uh this is the location uh if you're there there's lots of projects going on there and stuff but we will be over there we've got laptops set up for everyone to come and play some hands you don't need anything you just need to come and show up and you can actually play a hand yourself you don't have to watch a demo you don't have to to see it and think I wish I could be doing this right now you can experience it and see

the most updated shipped version that we have uh as far as uh today and I said I would tell you a little bit about a second game that we are working on and so here it is this is a screen grab from the second game we're working on it is currently a fully Unchained Hearthstone like TCG game it's using expandable card collections uh and really focused on the web 3 culture uh and and tying in some Community specific race is I don't want to dive too much into it because this is about to kill them but we are hard at work at a second game and thinking about kind of the future of cart studio and what we can do finally I saw some of you with your phones but this is really cool if you want to get in touch with either me this is my information but more

importantly that QR code will not take all of your crypto it will probably give you uh the information you may want to link up with this this is going to give you the links to find us on Discord telegram um Twitter and you can ask any more questions if you have any suggestions thoughts ideas you want to give us some feedback your media and you want to have a conversation anything you can even set up an interview or a conversation through calendly with the team uh we'll be happy to share some of our presentations that we've shared with some investors and uh to answer any more detailed questions that you may have so yeah that QR code will get you any

further information after this uh presentation which is now complete so I really do appreciate everyone being here at ECC and taking their time to uh to talk to to us or at least listen into to ZK Holden from cart studio so thank you guys thank you [Applause] all right and then finally if anyone wants I've got a couple of shirts I'm happy to to give a few shirts away any questions hey uh I I have a few questions so in like Zynga poker or not Zynga let's say

um I'm I'm losing the name of the card games but anyway they have certain mechanisms that are in play for people who are collaborating and using Bots how does that come into play with your product yeah that's a great question um it's a question that I think we're still trying to to work on as far as how do we handle you know multiple players at the same table or you're playing multiple hands um I don't think I I can't give you a direct answer right now that we have that completely figured out we're working on things such as like where if you're at a table and you're feeling like something is suspicious you can uh you can you can make a note of it and then we can have a team of let's say there's a community team of users that

will that will be kind of watching this and flagging certain wallet addresses to to take note of them but as far as the Bots issue I don't think we have an answer to it completely at some level because it's completely on chain we won't necessarily be able to solve everything right the bat but it's something that we're we're constantly thinking about and trying to work on okay and each so for example you have the Flop the turn the river are those so that's going through the blockchain is each transaction kind of being processed like is each move so for example if I check is that being submitted to the blockchain and then the result of all these will load the next card or is it kind of like pre-loaded and then like it's all deter like I'm just trying to

understand better how that works yeah so so basically each each hand completely on chain and each um each move on chain so each one will be a transaction okay cool thank you thank you yeah a follow-up to that so you said each move would be answered would that mean like if I if I fold do I have to wait 12 seconds for until the next player can make a decision or is it well so it's not 12 seconds for sure but yeah yeah I mean each each actual move that impacts the game in hand is is on chain so the key is you like you say 12 seconds really the key is that uh as we launched already with arbitrary Nova uh Linea we

built our own roll up the idea is to con completely make the efficiency and latency issues come as tight as possible so it's one second less than seconds and building our own customized uh chain and roll up to try to make that as as seamless and as quick as possible so you don't deal with that where you're just sitting around being like why is it taking so long because I understand no one is going to want to play a clunky taking forever type of game absolutely not okay but ungodly it would be you'd wait for the full chain yeah and so this is one of the things that we've learned through some of the the testing and being on some different change also is that clearly uh you know Network congestion can play a role and how long it takes for transactions to process and

so we're constantly innovating and improving uh our rollup and then trying to build our own chain even like L3 cool cool oh no I mean I think it's good that it's every uh Trent every move is a transaction yeah I'm just curious how it yeah and I think I want to stress that right there is a lot of people in products and I'm not going to talk about them per se doing poker I mean it's been tried a lot you see a lot of stuff I read a lot of stuff they can't be done or it's challenging or a lot of the stuff that is out there right now none of it is completely unchain a lot of it has come you know it goes off chain comes on chain so it kind of defeats the purpose yeah we're completely on chain 100 everything is anchi cool and then

yeah the other question is um how does the front end work is that like a static site or is there like server-side rendering for things like that because my my thought is like it's revealing my cards to me um ZK you know ensures that others can't see that but it's the front end or the back end that that is the issue there that's just like a front-end design it's not linked in with the the back end product but is there is there a back end like how is how do how does it reveal the cards to me that are secret to me Studio smart contract so it's like that's it through the smart contract

like connection Point cool and then sorry last question I'm hugging this um how is the randomness determined on chain how is it random yeah just using the ZK the ZK Shuffle smart contract okay right so the encryption decryption those are the that's that that's the exact point of Randomness cool thank you hello thank you uh are you not worried about the regulations yeah no so definitely regulation thank you for the question it's important to think about regulation and obviously across the world regulation is not the same right

the the laws here in France are not the same as the United States or in other countries so I want to just say about regulation very worried about regulation um in the sense of taking it very uh you know it's important to think about I wouldn't be here if I was thinking I'm going to be uh in Jeopardy the idea is that we're making a a free to play poker game that you can play on the blockchain uh if you want to do other things that you know build on top of the the platform layer you can do that but that would be sort of outside of the gaming experience and so therefore we shouldn't you know we've consulted with a number of lawyers and talked about this issue and obviously it's continued uh to be something that we think about uh and how

to to go about it and of course the laws and the regulations change too and they evolve So currently we're just a platform game layer the same same way someone would go and just play a free game on a mobile app from a centralized server that's how we think about it uh yeah I think the game is just as secure as the client will be like obviously the users will have to verify the ZK proofs that other players submitted so if there's a big client like or an attacker clients front end then they cannot rely on the security of the blockchain do you plan to have like an open source client or to like open the protocol that other people can build

on top of it so that you can verify the security assumptions yeah we plan to let everyone build on top of the protocol yeah everyone will be able to see everything in GitHub and have a chance to build on top of it maybe a last question I think we're good thank you very much thank you one more time guys and if anybody wants a few of these things please let me know again foreign