GAME CHANNELS

Game Channels are a major technological achievement for blockchain. The academic paper can be found here. They facilitate near infinite scalability for games or dapps running on the blockchain and allow near real time gameplay (limited by network speeds).

Xayaships demonstrates Game Channels for developers and shows how they can create near real time games that run entirely on the blockchain in a trustless and decentralised way. With respect to the Xaya platform, Game Channels can be thought of as individual payment channels that games run in.

They work by submitting a special transaction on the Xaya blockchain that creates a channel which other players can join. For Xayaships, when a channel is opened directly between 2 participants, real time gameplay can begin. In game channels the number of transactions can be unlimited, for free, and the speed is only limited by the network latency between the 2 players. Once a game is complete the winner can prove he won by posting the state to the blockchain. The other player can try to dispute it, but in the end the real winner will win as he has all the signed moves of the other player which prove he lost.

In all, a complex and real-time game can be played in a trustless, decentralised, provably fair way with little transaction fees and massively reducing blockchain bloat.