I'm Arvin Outz, and welcome back to a new AMA with Arbitrum.
As you know, we are having these daily AMAs with projects
building the Arbitrum ecosystem.
And today, we are discussing with Cosmic Battle.
And Churro is our guest host and Arbitrum contributor
that will be leading this AMA.
Yeah, really excited about this space.
And we have an amazing guest.
We have Jerome with us from Cosmic Battle with us today.
We're going to talk about everything Cosmic Battle.
So I want to pass over the mic to you
so you get a chance to introduce yourself, as well as
talk a bit about what is Cosmic Battle.
How is the sun on your end?
Well, very happy to be here with you.
Thanks for the invitation.
Yeah, so I'm extremely happy to be there today
because we've been in touch with the Arbitrum
I remember when we launched our first game back in early 2021,
we had a delightful discussion with the Arbitrum teams.
You were preparing for mainnet, and we
were trying to get in touch with you
to launch on the mainnet in the first time.
We were excited by the whole vision
for Arbitrum and its orbit chain back in the days.
And now the time has finally come.
I feel like planets are aligning,
like we are about to launch a new game on its own orbit
chain with the help of Adlayer.
So it feels like a really long journey that's finally
arriving at its destination.
And Cosmic Battle is a training card game
that has a lot of on-chain elements,
a lot of innovation on this front.
And it's scheduled for a release in a couple of weeks
I think it will be one of the first game
to feature this much on-chain elements
as an Epic Game Store-supported games.
We have many good features to show for ourself
and innovation to show for ourself.
It's been like two years of development
of the tech stack it features.
And I'm also very excited about the upcoming upgrades
to Stylus for the chain that we hosted on
because we wanna take care the most of this innovation
on the Arbitrum side to showcase good features
So yeah, well, thanks again for inviting me.
Very happy to tell you more about what we are building
and how we plan to leverage the Arbitrum stacks for it.
Yeah, no, I think it's awesome that you've been here
within the Arbitrum ecosystem since the beginning
and you guys didn't launch it, but it's cool
seeing you guys staying around and building
while seeing how the Arbitrum ecosystem has grown.
Lots of things have happened
over the course of two years with Arbitrum.
I mean, we had Arbitrum Nitro, right?
You had Arbitrum Nova, the gaming chain for Arbitrum.
And then, yeah, recently we had Arbitrum Stylus, right,
that would enable Rust developers to build on Arbitrum
using any of their favorite programming language
And you also have other innovations
that are going on as well within the Arbitrum ecosystem.
So it's really cool to see you guys still here
and building while all this is going on.
But yeah, I'm really excited to learn more
about the story behind Cosmic Battle.
So do you wanna talk about, walk us through us
like the journey of how Cosmic Battle began?
What was the origins of it and where are you at right now?
So Cosmic Battle is a game produced by Kometh Game Studio.
We are a team of about 25 people that has been around since,
well, late 2020 was the creation of the company.
The team itself is made of seasoned blockchain developers
and veterans from this ecosystem.
I've been in the ecosystem for about 10 years now,
had a leadership position at Ernst & Young consensus ledger
And Kometh was at its core initiative
to bring a new waves of users onto the blockchain space.
And we wanted to bring on those new waves with gaming
because we thought that gaming was a match for blockchain
And we started to work on a first game
that was purely on-chain,
like everything was happening on-chain
and this game is still up and going on polygon POS.
You can still play this game
because everything is on-chain.
I think we were the first or almost the first game
I think Dark Forest beat us by about a couple of days
when they launched live at the first place.
But we really found that gaming and blockchain
has a lot to do with each other's, a lot of synergies.
The thing that we like the most with blockchain and gaming
is around the hyper-financialization
that it brings to the game that blockchain is applied to.
We also like the fact that blockchain
can be a meta game for the on-chain-ness of a game,
like bringing in your history as a blockchain user
into a new game and have a personalized experience.
But also, blockchain has autonomous world for games,
like a game that will never ever stop
because it lives in the blockchain.
So as long as the blockchain keeps on living,
the game will continue to live.
And when a blockchain is correctly designed,
you can still run a node as an individual
So that's a different perspective
that it brings to, that blockchain brings to gaming.
And this is why we built this company in the first place,
like to try out those applications for games
and see how we can bring new waves of users
into trying out those games.
So we did the first game.
And then we decided to work on another game
using the same assets, the same story,
the same element that we built in this first game.
And that took us into a two-year journey
between late 2021 and up to now,
with an alpha that we run in about 12 months.
And then we started to rework on the graphics
and the overall look and feel of the game
to make it more close to the standard
that you would expect in a TCG
and a game of that ambition.
And also we started to work on a different tech element
that we need to nail in order to make the game accessible
And that's not an easy thing to do.
We did a lot of R&D on Wallops themselves.
We even contributed to the OP stack.
We received a grant for that
because we implemented a Data Availability Committee
because in the first place,
we were excited about the optimism modularity of the stack.
And then we started to work on different pieces
of cryptographic primitives
that help us on onboard people with account abstraction.
And this is where we found,
well, this is how we found we could bring
the most value out of our engineering time.
And it turns out that we can leverage stylus
for the kind of onboarding that we like to do.
And also we can supercharge account abstraction
and onboarding with this kind of innovation with Wasm.
And we also find a lot of good things
in terms of onboarding from L2 to L3.
And the maturity of the antitrust setup
gave us a lot of guarantees
that the thing will work properly.
And we started to find good partners,
like the old discussions that we had
with the Arbitrum team were revived.
We had comprehensive years
and good tips on what to do and how to launch.
And we also spoke to the Arch Layer team
to help us out in spinning the infrastructure.
And now, well, yeah, again, planets are aligned.
We are finalizing and stress testing
different deployment and different scenarios.
Like we are very confident on a successful launch
in terms of infrastructure and attention.
So yeah, but I just can't wait for the release.
And I really appreciate those little talk
with the Arbitrum community
because it's good to be part of a new wave.
You know, especially for gaming too,
for those that want to build their own native economies,
I think Arbitrum Orbit is the place for that
for gaming developers that want to build their economies there.
And I think an interesting part too
about Arbitrum Orbit that you brought up as well
is the amount of scalability it comes with
in terms of upgrades, right?
Because anything that happens to,
any upgrades that happens to the Arbitrum Nitro stack,
Arbitrum Orbit chains have the opportunity
to opt into those upgrades.
So for example, one of them you talked about,
which is like Arbitrum Stylus
that would enable developers to build some more contracts
in Rust, C, C++, that is fully composable
and interoperable with EVM, oscillating some more contracts.
That's a really cool and amazing technological breakthrough
because outside of web three,
majority of developers outside of that or Rust developers,
their community is like that outside of web three.
So in terms of the developer community,
once Arbitrum Stylus goes live,
it's gonna be really cool to see Rust developers
building on Arbitrum Orbit.
And yeah, follow up question I have
with relating to Arbitrum Orbit
with the chain that you guys are building,
how do you guys plan on utilizing Arbitrum Stylus?
Yeah, so a burning question in the first place for us
was like, should we do an L3 or should we do an L2?
And we decided to go with an L3
because for us, it's important to be able
to onboard the layman onto blockchain.
And you can work around these different ways.
You can also feel like people are just going to pay
with Apple Pay, Google Pay, credit card and so on
and never touch any crypto on their accounts.
But sooner or later, they will have to,
they will need a way to acquire some crypto on their wallets
or whatever type of accounts
that you are exposing to them.
So for us, it was way easier
and way comprehensible to onboard people directly
because if you take, for example,
the average basket will be like,
I wanna put $20, $40, $50,
just taking into account the transaction costs
to onboard on such small amounts
on another one will make it completely impossible.
So doing it from the L2 onto the L3
was the most natural way to do it.
Now, when it comes to L3 itself
and how we leverage the tech stack,
the way we designed the game
and the way we designed the interactions
between the players and so on
is purely abstracted from blush and perspective.
Like the default setup as a user
is you are interacting with the chain
Okay, you can of course interact with the chain
as any EVM chain with your own accounts,
sending you on transaction,
paying for your own fees and so on,
but we wanna make sure that the default way to do it
will be through smart accounts.
I think it's part of the long-term vision
for Ethereum in the next 24 to 36 months
to upgrade accounts into smart accounts.
But the good thing about smart accounts
is that as an application,
I can sponsor this kind of interactions.
I can make sure that you don't have to
have the native currency, which is Ethereum, Ether.
First, in order to do a transaction,
you can get sponsored by your applications
because this interaction that you are doing
the application is good for the game,
good for the company, behind the game, whatever.
That removes competitive friction from the user
to have to do an on-ramp first.
They will do an on-ramp at some point if they want to
and we think that if we want to,
you should onboard into a game
as you would onboard into any game distributed
You will just download the game,
and do more with the game if you feel like to.
So we built this kind of section solution
that rely on Gnosis Safe,
the best type of smart account
that you can get right now.
It wasn't an easy way forward
rather than building your own smart account,
but we choose to use Safe for safety reasons
and auditability reasons and ecosystem reasons.
So as a user, you have a safe.
You activate this safe with your fingerprints
because we verify signatures that are generated
the tablet enclave, whatever you're using to play.
And this specific cryptographic curve
has a solidity implementation
for the verification of the signature.
And this is how we can leverage stylus in the first place.
Like one good thing about stylus,
that the Wasm virtual machine is highly optimized
and highly efficient in various ways.
So if you wanna use exotic cryptographic primitive,
you can code those primitives as precompiles into stylus
and require them to be executed into the AVM
through the precompile ability of stylus.
So we will do different implementation
of the cool cryptographic primitives that we use,
execute them into Wasm and read the result
and execute the result directly into our RB chain
So being super gas efficient
and leveraging this new technology.
like I think Wasm on the side of the EVM
allow us to open up the developer space
that didn't want to learn solidity and so on.
I'm not so sure it will go this way,
like from one day to the next,
like, hey, we have stylus,
you can write spot on tracking rust.
You know rust, like come and do something in rust.
I'm not sure it will go this way in the first place
because a lot of things are still being interpreted
and canonical from an EVM perspective,
but it will definitely help us do more secure
If you are a blockchain developer that knows rust,
that knows C, that knows the C++
so that I've done something on Kerou
and wanna use that into Wasm.
So it's opening up the realm of possibility
for blockchain application as a whole.
That's for me the low hanging fruit
and that's what we wanna do.
Like in the early days of Kamef, our first game,
If you wanted to do a TCG that's fully on chain,
we realized that we needed to code thousands and thousands
and thousands of lines of solidity code.
And those lines of solidity code
are going to be hard to audit.
They're going to be hard to optimize and so on
because solidity has not been made
for doing weird stuff or different type of weird stuff.
Whether when you look at Wasm,
it's made to do a lot of weird stuff.
So for us, we take stylus as an opportunity
to optimize a lot of thing
that we can put as precompiled via Wasm,
but also for us to put a lot of things on chain
that would have been extremely difficult
to go in solidity and to execute on chain
Because we can now code them in rust
and make them precompiled and rely on stylus
So that's the kind of thing
that we wanna do in the short term.
We wanna be able to leverage the upgraded into stylus
to bring more unsaneness into our TCG
and bring more onboarding friendliness
to the way we like to onboard people in our game
and maybe show a good example of how we can be done
for other people that want to inspire themselves
we wanna open up our ecosystem
into other contribution in the same direction.
And yeah, I think you brought up a really interesting point
in terms of like the art room style smart contracts
in general, like how there's some things
that aren't possible with the facility contracts
because of some of the stuff you mentioned,
but I think it's gonna be exciting
to see developers utilize art from style smart contracts
to push those limits of the facility
that this stuff that you couldn't do
on the facility smart contracts on arbitrary stylus.
So that's gonna be something really cool to see.
And in terms of like on chainness for cosmic battle,
what are some features can users expect
like on chain features that users can expect
when they're playing the game?
Is everything fully on chain
in terms of like the entity cards, right?
The cards that you're playing with
or what are some aspects of the game that are on chain?
Yeah, that's an important thing to underline here.
Everything that's part of the economy of the game,
like everything that you can claim ownership on
within the game is based on chain.
Like it's important for us to give this guarantee
to the player because we wanna stress
that we are going to create other experiences
and other games and other things that can use elsewhere.
They can also claim ownership and do things themselves
or build on top of or build on the side of
via those assets that are technically
blockionally owned by them because they are on chain assets.
everything that is economy related with already the card,
the spaceship that they play,
the potential element of just decoration
or aesthetic of the spaceships and skins and so on,
everything has to be on chain
because we want those things to exist
even if we don't exist anymore.
Or we wanna make sure that we give away
those things to the player for them to play around
and collect and trade and so on.
But that's just the NFT and token path, of course.
Now, we are at core believers into blockchain
into games and games into blockchain.
Like for us, it's not just technology that we sprinkle
because we wanna tap into the web tree community
because they are patriots and like games
built on top of blockchain.
Like we don't want to get into
specifically the niche of web tree players.
We strongly believe that there is a good reason
why blockchain and gaming can get along very well.
And for us, it means that any web tree user
that finds a good web tree game
will appreciate the game for what it is
and not because it's just fancy NFTs and so on.
And that means for us that we wanna do more on chain
and open up the very engine of the game
to sort parties, to decentralization
and peer-to-peer activities.
So when you come and play KAMF, KAMF cosmic battle,
when you come and play cosmic battle and you start a game,
you're going to be matched against a player
and you're going to play against this player
and you're gonna play, you're gonna win,
you're gonna lose, there is a ladder,
there is everything you can expect from a TCG.
Now, in the second part of the game,
you should be able to play against me.
You should be, I should be able to challenge Truro
and said, okay, Truro, you wanna do a one-v-one,
you're gonna do a best of three, let's play a game.
Let's see which one of us is the best at this game
on this format of cards and so on.
Do you need us, cosmic battle, to do this game?
Or can you maybe play against me
without reliance on the cosmic battle itself?
Well, in order to do that, we wanna make sure
that the very engine of the game can be executed on chain.
And coding the engine of the game as smart contract
is something that we did before.
It's something that a couple of companies
are trying to achieve with blockchain engine builders
like MUD, like Curio, like others.
Those guys are trying hard to bring this kind of reality
to create a new framework of developing a game
we like a lot those kind of initiative.
It doesn't really work for our use case of TCG,
but it can definitely work if you adapt the language
that you use to code the contract in the language
that we use to cut the engine of the game
So that's why we can leverage stylus with this.
Like we can create a version of our game engine
that can run into stylus via Wasm
and that give access for the players
to play the game without us.
And eventually to modify the game
and do another version where, I don't know,
this card that is doing 10 damages
instead is going to be doing nine damages
because it needs an Earth.
Like the players can do their own version of the game.
And as long as they agree to play this new version
of the game, they will have their own meta
Or they can play against each others
into a tournament that they host themselves
without us, that they create their own rewards for it,
that they just rely on the execution on-chain
But also it means that if we ever decide
not to maintain cosmic battle in the long run,
the game can continue to exist
and the community can come to a consensus
to a new version or a new set of cards
that gets integrated into the game
and that can be used into the game
So this very openness that the blockchain technology
allow and push forward can be extended
to a much wider spectrum of interaction
between the community and the players
so as to create more immersive experience
and also reward properly the creators and maintainer
that want to do crazy things around that.
And doing it for Insolity is still possible,
It's just extremely hard to maintain,
extremely hard to optimize.
That's why we need side EVMs
to execute it and optimize it.
That's why we were excited for Silas, by the way.
Yeah, it sounds like you guys are giving players
the complete control and freedom
to build out the game however they want,
which is really cool to see
because outside of web 3 gaming
and traditional gaming, right?
Players don't have that freedom or input
to help with the creativity and direction of a game.
So I think it's awesome that you guys are doing that
It opened up to different dimension for us
to see that once our game are published on the blockchain,
they're continuing to live with or without us.
You know, we had this tagline in the news recently
where a Ubisoft executive were saying,
like, you know, the players should be,
I don't remember exactly what the guys said,
but it was like, they should get accustomed
or not owning the part of the game they created.
Well, we think it should be otherwise,
like the players should be expecting to own the thing
that they should expect to own part of the journey
in the game, part of the IP of the game,
part of the asset of the game,
part of the copy of the game that they have,
and they should be able to take over it.
Like I've been playing various board games
and Dungeons and Dragons and so on.
Like I like the fact that you can just,
you own a copy and you contribute
and you create your own experiences.
And that's putting back gaming
into its initial roots of contribution
and having fun with your friends and family
and the community that you got to know with the game,
with playing the game and so on.
And it's also a great turnaround moment
in terms of the gaming industry
because more and more of the tools
that we use to create games
are getting better support
and being more accessible to the layman.
I'm thinking about different tools in generative AI
and so on, or code assistance that you can leverage
if you want to create different adventures
you get into a situation where potentially
any passionate individuals for a specific game
can do something of their own
and contribute and bring more value and persistence
to a certain game and a certain IP.
Yeah, I don't know if this is like a good example,
but something that I remembered was playing RuneScape.
Obviously you have like the main RuneScape.
I've ever played RuneScape
and then I don't know what happened,
and then a bunch of players
just started creating their own version of RuneScape,
and you had a bunch of other different servers.
So I feel like that's a prime example
of just giving the community ownership of the game
to do whatever they want with it
and build their own economies and scans
and like the world however they want to.
I think that's a prime example of that,
just like giving players the ability
to do whatever they want,
I mean, it's like when you open up an old drawer
and you find your old Magic the Gathering deck,
you wanna look at the different cards,
you wanna call your best buddy
and say like, hey, you remember when you played this game,
you still have it, let's play.
I feel like the absence of persistence
in many of the modern games
is creating a problem for the gaming industry
in terms of lifetime value of those different users.
Let's thank Ubisoft again.
They recently launched Prince of Persia,
a new game on all the consoles.
It's been 15 years or 14 years or maybe 12 years.
I had to suffer the last game
from the last game of Prince of Persia.
I used to own a copy of Prince of Persia
I don't own this copy anymore.
So I'm way less linked or I don't feel
I belong to this community or I don't feel like
I'm being part of the Prince of Persia franchise.
But the fact that I've owned
and I get to see some from time to time
in my environment, in my home, at my place,
I mean, more heavily of this very copy,
it gives me more attachment,
more feeling that I belong into this community
and I feel like I want to play it again,
I want to see where this franchise went,
what I want to see the last game and so on.
And if you start to remove that
and have purely digital thing
that live on a server that may be turned off,
that you don't see that often,
that you don't get to remember
from time to time that you have them,
it's completely disconnecting you
and getting you more into a position
where you're just here to consume the game
Completely and the complete opposite,
you have board games that you have a big box
and we're full of stuff and this big box,
you can play whenever you want
or you can have your nephew or that comes at home
and say like, hey, I want to play this game,
Oh, let's play hero quest.
Oh, let's remember all the extensions of hero quest,
Well, blockchain gaming can really link the two,
like you get the goodies of board games
with the distribution and the scale
of classic software distribution for games.
And that's an exciting change for the whole industry,
And like, this is like one of the main reasons
why I'm super excited about on-chain gaming in general.
So yeah, super bullish on that.
And I know we have a few minutes left,
so I want to give you an opportunity
to share what's coming soon to Cosmic Battle
and where can people go learn more about it?
Oh, so the place where people can learn more about it
is definitely our Twitter account, Cosmic Battle.
You can also, of course, look for Cosmic with a K,
C-O-S-M-I-K, Cosmic Battle, on Epic Game Store.
You can add the game to your wishlist
and know exactly when it will come out.
We are going to announce pretty soon
a definitive release date.
I mean, you know what it is with those stores,
you have to submit the build,
the build has to be accepted and you can say,
okay, I can get out there on this date.
So we are pretty soon for an official
announcement of the dates.
I'm almost 100% sure it's going to be in February,
We'll announce the definitive date finally.
The game is deployed on the layer tree
called Muster, M-U-S-T-E-R.
The chain ID for this chain is 0xFEE, F-E-E,
because everything is sponsored.
So it's a free chain to use
as long as you're using one of our games
or as long as the game that,
or the application that wants to allow you
The chain is already live.
We are not super public about it,
because we are still stress testing
different features on it.
But you can expect us to release pretty soon
also a white paper explaining all the good things
that you can find on this chain.
follow us on Twitter, Cosmic Battle.
You can also follow us, Kamel from Twitter
if you like more tech-oriented updates.
You can add us to your wish list on AP Game Store.
And you can expect us to help the Arbitrum community shine
because we have a lot of goodies
to release in the next weeks and months.
I also think you guys are one of the first orbit chains
So that's a cool milestone for you guys.
So yeah, that's awesome to see.
Yeah, you know, it's good to be pioneers,
but it's also good to reflect
on what worked and what didn't work.
So I'm very happy to do again
this little podcast with you guys
and the Twitter space or X space or Y space.
I don't know if we will change its name
in the next months and also in one year to see,
to tell like, hey, you know,
now that we have 1000 orbit chains,
which orbit chain model works and didn't work,
like what was the good approach?
What was the right approach?
What was the wrong approach?
This is something that we discussed a lot with Alt-Layer.
Like we're part of the first L3 and L2s
and alternative layers that Alt-Layer is launching.
And we are oftentimes like discussing like,
hey, should we provide an ease for V2 on this?
Should we provide an NFT marketplace on this?
Is the right approach going for like a abstraction?
We definitely believe it is.
So we are pushing this thing.
We'll see if that works, we'll see if that doesn't work.
But that's also what the beauty of this Molita stack,
like you can launch infrastructure
that can support ambitious projects.
You can see this infrastructure
and it's fixing this to be adapted and so on.
And you can do different tryouts
and eventually also move very fast,
very, very fast without breaking things,
which we expect not to break anything.
And yeah, so far so good.
Like the support from the ARMY Tram ecosystem
has been very, very good.
And the technology also very reliable.
So super happy about what's going on.
Yeah, I mean, like the first thing that comes up to mind
when I think about ARMY Tram Orbit,
it's like an amusement park.
You could literally like go in there,
launch your own custom chain.
You could customize it however you want,
even the tech stack itself.
So the freedom and creativity there
is gonna be something really cool to see
from not just a concept battle from the mustard chain,
but also from other orbit chains
that are building on top of the ARMY Tram Nitrostack,
like XI and a few other gaming orbit chains
So no, definitely want to like invite you guys
and a few other orbit chains like down the line
have like this really cool big discussion
on like the positives, the negatives
and the learning lessons behind it.
No, definitely wanna invite you guys
to one of those discussions
because I think that's just gonna bring new ideas,
build an awesome orbit ecosystem.
So super excited to have that.
But yeah, thank you so much, Jerome,
for joining us today and to everybody else.
Yeah, well, you know what we could do
is do an in-person followup during each CC in Brussels.
Like I think most of the Casping Battle team
Many of the RB Tram team will be there.
Many of the ComF team will be there.
Likely the guys from other orbit chains
So we can do a little get together
and get to meet and greet,
do a shut down house discussion
if things didn't went well
or do something truly public
and just discuss and share our experience
that should be leveraging this technology
for their own product as well.
I think this year we have like lots
of RB Tram day in-person events happening across
outside of the crypto world.
So I'm sure at some point we'll have like a panel
with orbit chains that we're probably building on orbit,
So yeah, definitely would be cool to have you guys there.
I don't have the full details yet,
but this is just an idea.
I'm not sure it's gonna happen at some point,
but yeah, definitely would be cool
to bring all the RB Tram orbit builders
and connect and share ideas of the pros and cons.
And yeah, it will be a party.
And for the listeners, like my DMs are open.
Like don't hesitate to drop me a message
if you have a burning question
or wanna discuss something
that I like to touch base on.
And yeah, like keep it coming.
Happy to chat more offline and asynchronously.
Well, yeah, thank you Jerome for joining us today
and hope everybody here has a great Tuesday.
Thanks again to all of you.
We appreciate you so much.
And can I ask you another question please cultural,
we'd love to come to yourJust hang it for us.
Dodge US and let us talk on this on Thursday.