Chimaera - The Ultimate Blockchain Gaming Platform

The online gaming industry has boomed rapidly to where it is now: a multi-billion-dollar industry that is only expected to grow even further as interest levels spike to an all-time high.

Data shows that the gaming industry is worth $109 billion dollars in 2017 with that estimated to climb to almost $130 billion by 2020.

Despite the massive market, there are still some problems.

New and independent game developers or studios still face the barrier to entry of time and costs from a game’s concept to actually penetrating the market. It’s well-known today that smaller game studios have no way of being exposed to the public without at least a few million dollars in the bank.

With the blockchain, however, things are starting to change for the better.

The biggest money-maker of today’s games are in-game items, which are essential virtual assets that either strengthen the player or are purely for cosmetics; fortunately, the blockchain makes the creation and trading of virtual assets so much easier.

This increasing demand for rich virtual gaming universes where owning and trading virtual assets is possible serves an important purpose for games as they provide a reliable channel of revenue for developers.

This also benefits players themselves; the time and effort put in by the gamer can satisfy their cravings and at the same time, make money through trading these virtual items on marketplaces, which will soon be enabled on the blockchain.

Like all good things, there are some problems inherent in this situation.

First, developers have to overcome technical challenges in scaling the game content itself especially in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), as well as solving all the challenges related to cryptocurrencies and asset storage ledgers.

Introducing Chimaera

Chimaera is a blockchain platform that provides a full suite of tools and infrastructure for game developers to build their own game worlds and ideas on the blockchain itself.

With smart contracts, newer and richer in-game worlds can be created by developers while item trading systems become much more enhanced, flexible, and the most important one of them all, more rewarding to the player base and game developers.

Despite its highly technical nature, the Chimaera platform is incredibly easy to use and intuitive for users.

The Chimaera team aims to support developers and help overcome the problem of marketing games due to limitations like budget issues or time constraints; with Chimaera, game developers can get their vision to the market easier than it was ever before at a lower risk of failing.

It is fair to say that Chimaera aims to democratize the games development industry—as it should be.

This platform benefits more than just developers; through the launch of a decentralized virtual item trading and sharing platform, players can earn and profit from various gaming achievements in new games through the seamless trade of virtual items from one game to another.

The Chimaera blockchain platform will include these following features:

Fully-decentralized massively multiplayer Decentralised Autonomous Universes (DAU)
A 100% provably fair virtual item ownership system with simple, safe, and secure trading platform
Cost-effective and rapid concept to market launch for game developers and studios

Here’s a summary of what the Chimaera platform is, from the team themselves:

Just imagine, being inside a decentralized autonomous universe, unstoppable and secure. Interacting on the blockchain itself and communicating securely over encrypted text or voice. Imagine owning your own virtual apartment that you can sell or trade for real-world value, or even share the keys (symbolic of encryption keys) with a friend.

What makes this project so strong is the Chimaera team, which includes several blockchain gaming pioneers, developers with valuable experience, as well as respected business experts to work on the non-technical side of things.

How does Chimaera work?

As mentioned earlier, Chimaera allows trustless (without an intermediary) trading of game items, game-specific currencies, and game accounts with the platform’s official cryptocurrency, CHI.

There are also two technologies used to help achieve the platform’s vision:

Game channels

Game channels are extensions of payment channels in Bitcoin, which can also be applied to games. This allows moves between multiple players off the blockchain, which helps Chimaera to scale globally.

This will also allow for near real-time gaming on the blockchain.

Ephemeral timestamps

When a dispute happens in a game channel, transactions on the main Chimaera blockchain need to be made in order to resolve the disputes.

To overcome this, the Chimaera platform uses a clever combination of the blockchain’s properties, Merkle hash commitments (to verify transactions without the full blockchain), as well as fraud proofs.

This ensures that transaction fees on the platform will NEVER be a loss for participants.

In addition to that, Chimaera also offers the following benefits to users:

A payment gateway with little to zero fees and a 0% fraud system
Flexible monetization options for users
Matchmaking for multiplayer games
Fully compatible with most game engines
Earn and win tokens from playing games on the platform
Cross-platform gaming
A secure social networking platform for users

An example Chimaera use case

A good use case of Chimaera is in games that involve cards or something similar (like Hearthstone, for instance).

With the blockchain, it is possible to store assets like collectibles, sports cards, or other types of gaming cards.

These cards or assets can then be traded or sold safely and securely on the Chimaera blockchain using atomic transactions.

Despite the complicated process, users don’t have to worry as the platform is extremely easy to use UI-wise; all the technical things happen under the hood without needing the user’s attention.

In addition to storing assets, Chimaera also allows developers to build fully-fledged card games on the platform that can be trustless, serverless, and probably fair if the developer wants to do so.