🎮 Account Abstraction
Openfort's Vision for Seamless Blockchain Gaming Experiences
Welcome to Startup ROI! I’m Kyle O'Brien, an early stage deep tech investor — alongside Rand Hindi— and community builder based in Paris, France. I write what I see. These days, it’s mostly explorations into various categories of interest including:
The Future of Computing
Blockchain Infrastructure (Privacy & Encryption)
Frontier Health
I enjoy taking complex topics and reducing them into accessible articles and top-notch memes. I also throw bangin’ dinner parties for cool people in tech and venture.
Disclosure: I met the Alavedra brothers (Founders of Openfort) a couple years back in Paris. They are laid-back yet relentless founders who’ve spent the past several years building, operating and (in on case) selling startups. After a stint in tech Mecca (San Francisco) they returned to Barcelona where they are scaling up an exciting new project that I’ll be covering today. This is not a paid sponsorship, but I did speak with Joan directly about the business and we are releasing this in conjunction with some other PR (🎉). All that to say: they are some cool founders, with a compelling project and I got to dive deeper into a space that is relatively new to me, as you will soon find out 👇🏼(but as usual take anything I say with a grain of salt).
Christmas ‘96
Picture this: it’s Christmas Day, 1996, somewhere in the suburbs of Chicago. Young Kyle (me) waits impatiently on the landing while my parents Santa puts the finishing touches on the gifts beneath the tree. Finally, we’re given the go ahead to descend the staircase and begin unwrapping our presents. There are many neatly wrapped items but one catches his eye — it’s just the right size. Young Kyle picks it up, shakes it for good measure, then tears open the wrapping paper. Just as he suspected: a Playstation One!
Now if only he could identify which package held the complementary game disc, he could fire up the console and get to playing… His Dad nods approvingly, eyeing the suspiciously flat/rectangular gift poking out the top of a stocking hanging from the fireplace. That’s it! Like a feral cat, Young Kyle shreds the outer layer of paper and tape to unveil none other than Crash Bandicoot. Lacking interest in further ceremony, he made a beeline for the attic — the time had come…
After stressfully fiddling with some cables, the console lit up, the activation sound — oh to hear that sweet sound for the first time again — blared from the speakers, inciting what can only be described as pure ecstasy in the mind of a 5 year old.
When the home screen finally appeared, Kyle felt he was about to embark on a life-changing journey. All he had to do was hit “x” on his controller signalling the console to <Start Game> — he pushed the button with enthusiasm. What the heck?
OK, in reality this didn’t happen. Young Kyle played to his heart’s content for the next 12 hours, without breaks I might add. But let’s pretend this did happen for a second. The example above is a very Web2.0 analogy for the problems facing the nascent blockchain gaming industry. This is not unlike the user experience in crypto-gaming today. Not literally, of course — can you imagine a crypto-kid going to the post office? The point is that there is serious friction onboarding new users to into the crypto-gaming ecosystem and it has to do primarily with wallets. This is where we will focus our attention today.
Now that we’ve taken a walk down memory lane, it’s time we looked into the future of gaming to figure out how the Gen-Z version of Young Kyle will get the ultimate, frictionless gaming experience he deserves.
Cheat Codes (i.e. TL;DR)
Blockchain gaming accounts for a (surprisingly) large portion of on-chain transactions
Crypto & Gaming fit together naturally — digital economies, rewards, in-game asset ownership are second nature to your average gamer. Crypto just makes it more financially real
To use crypto, you need a “wallet” — this applies in game settings as well and is a huge point of friction in the onboarding process (partially due to L1 issues but *hint* there are changes coming)
The main breakthrough (and talk of the town) in the Ethereum community is what’s called "Account Abstraction” which has numerous advantages for users and developers alike
Wallets were expected to be the easy on-ramp into crypto but have fallen short of their promise. Perhaps a good analogy and simple UX aren’t enough
Openfort aims to make the wallet “invisible” to players, seamless for game developers and unlock a whole new set of use-cases, onboarding tons of new users in the process!
Playing the Game
If I’m being honest, my video game days ended shortly after that Christmas in 1995. I played a bit of Nintendo at a sleepover here and there, but ultimately, other hobbies captured my attention and by the time I got to college, I was the N00b watching people play Halo in the dorm (because I didn’t know how to play). It’s easy for a gaming outsider to assume that the rest of the world followed suit — but that’s far from reality. Gaming (including Blockchain gaming) has grown exponentially in the period since I put down the controller. And the numbers speak for themselves:
Without going into too much detail, Blockchain games have taken over the ecosystem in a pretty big way in the past couple of years. It first came onto my radar when
wrote an article on Axie Infinity titled Infinite Revenue, Infinity Possibilities in his popular newsletter, . A year later, TechCrunch published a piece on how North Korean hackers stole $625M from a side-chain connected to the game — but that’s another story…You may have also heard of Sorare, the fantasy football (European ⚽️ not American 🏈!) that has raised nearly a billion dollars to scale their NFT-based fantasy sports platform. In fact, you may have discovered them here, I wrote about them a long time ago in a piece titled A League of Their Own.
So what is the difference between a Blockchain game and a regular video game? There are many. But for today’s purpose, the major differentiator is the use of wallets. In crypto, wallets serve as your digital identity. You have a public key (or ETH Address) which is kind of like your crypto-email or unique identifier. Anyone can see it, send information to it or query information about it assuming you have previous transactions on a public ledger. You also have a private key — this is kind of like your password. You use this to execute and verify transactions. You’re probably thinking: this is just like a web3 Xbox login. But because crypto wallets are inherently payment-oriented and rely heavily on user actions, they have many drawbacks.
Lost your private keys? Your account is gone forever. Some wallets only interact with certain chains or have limited features. To sign a transaction (execute an action on chain) a weird pop-up in chrome might prompt you to type in a password or key phrase to move onto the next step.
Long story short: lots of wallets, lots of functionality gaps, lots of barriers to entry. Nevertheless, people are playing these games despite the fact that there are some inherent challenges to the existing workflow. Challenges that Openfort plans to solve for!
Abstract Artistry
It has been a long-term dream of the Ethereum developer community to achieve what is known as account abstraction. Like most things in crypto, it sounds more complicated than it really is. Basically, the underlying Ethereum architecture proposes two different “account types” — externally owned accounts (EOAs — users, like you and me) and Smart Contract accounts (this is essentially hard-coded logic that executes based on specific parameters; once implemented, it sits on the Blockchain autonomously waiting to fulfill it’s mission). There were many pros to this setup in the early days, but as complexity and usage increased, roadblocks to adoption emerged.
According to the Ethereum prince himself (Vitalik Buterin), there are many advantages to merging these two functions (i.e. Account Abstraction) that would enable creativity in wallet design to unlock some pretty useful features:
Multisigs and social recovery
More efficient and simpler signature algorithms (eg. Schnorr, BLS)
Post-quantum safe signature algorithms (eg. Lamport, Winternitz)
Upgradeability
The example I started with in the essay is a big one for gaming — imagine having to put up some meager amount of money just to sign into the game in the first place. Account Abstraction allows a tool like Openfort to front the money, thereby skipping this step and seamlessly onboarding the first-time user (who will likely end up spending more money in-game down the line). No more calling a chrome extension, swapping currencies., waiting for the Blockchain to update so you can pay gas fees — all before hitting “Start”).
But even with these awesome possibilities, there’s still a barrier to scaling this up. Every Blockchain game developer won’t want to build, deploy and maintain their own wallet. Think about eCommerce before Stripe — payment gateways all looked sketchy, didn’t always function properly and were a pain in the ass for online vendors. Today, you can copy and paste a line of code and you have the full-throated power of internet payment super-rails! That’s exactly what Openfort is building for game developers.
What the guys at Openfort have done is take an emerging technology and generated an open-source tool that makes developers lives easier and gamers happier. Build something people want is the old Y-Combinator mantra. In this case, their direct (and indirect) stakeholders will be delighted.
The Next Billion
If you parse through tech Twitter you’ll see founders and investors alike touting their efforts to “onboard the next billion users to crypto.” There is probably some analog to this from the early days of the internet. And it was probably equally as cringeworthy at the time. It’s an ambitious target (and sometimes too much ambition is unflattering) that has two primary levers to move the needle:
User Experience (UX)
The “Killer App” (or in this case dApp — decentralized application)
At this stage, user experience in crypto leaves something to be desired. Furthermore, crypto is yet to find its genuine usefulness (beyond the financialization of all things digital). The genius behind Openfort’s vision is that they sit at the intersection of the two. Openfort is building a product to enhance user (and developer) experience AND it is operating in a space that might be considered the closest thing to a “killer app” in the crypto ecosystem.
👏🏼 Congrats to the Alavedra brothers on raising $3M to bring their wallet-as-a-service infrastructure to market !
If you’re interested in this topic, you might enjoy this podcast featuring David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark in which he claims Bitcoin is the new payment rails. I found it fascinating!