Interview with zkHoldem Co-founder Henry: How to build the first ZK-based full-chain Poker

**CoinVoice: Tell us a bit about yourself and your experience with Crypto. **

Henry: Hi, I’m Henry, Co-founder of Khartes Studio. First of all, thank you very much Coinvoice for this interview invitation, and I am very happy to be one of the builders of this emerging track of FOCG, to talk about the journey of our Khartes Studio and zkHoldem team for more than a year.

I first came into contact with the cryptocurrency circle for about 17 years, and most of the time I was active on Twitter as an individual investor, because of my own operational background and my understanding of degen culture, I also helped some well-known Crypto projects at home and abroad to do marketing and growth planning solutions.

CoinVoice: Can you give us a brief introduction to zkHoldem?

Henry: zkHoldem, the world’s first full-chain Texas Hold’em game and the first app for Khartes Studio, is now available on the Manta Pacific L2 mainnet. Through the application of zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption and other technologies, we have brought asymmetric information card games to the chain for the first time, so as to realize the absolute fairness and decentralization of game shuffling and card issuance at the code level.

In the more than a month since our official launch at the end of October, we have reached an average of 200+ DAUs and 6,000+ historical game rounds while gas fees continue to remain high, and we are very grateful for the support of all community members.

We will also be releasing Khartes L3 in collaboration with Lumoz soon, which will significantly reduce the average gas fee per game and optimize the overall transaction speed, so you can look forward to it.

CoinVoice: The popularity of omni-chain games continues to rise, why did you choose the combination of Poker and omni-chain games?

Henry: We decided to do the first demo of zkHoldem to participate in the hackathon that Eth San Francisco hosted last year. At that time, the idea was actually very simple, first, because our team itself is a loyal fan of Poker, and has also stepped on a lot of pitfalls in the matter of Poker, so we hope that we can fundamentally solve the problem of fairness and transparency of Poker by bringing Poker to the chain; second, we also found that most of the applications of zero-knowledge proofs in the market are still at the level of infrastructure, and we hope to use this very obvious application scenario to truly bring the cutting-edge technologies of zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption to ordinary consumers to experience。

From a future perspective, by bringing Poker on-chain, we have the potential to bring a lot of new possibilities to this traditional game.

First of all, through the integration of zkHoldem with DeFi, we will have the opportunity to significantly increase the use of users’ funds. For example, users can use their stETH or AAVE assets as collateral to borrow CHIP to play cards, which is not possible in a traditional Poker game.

Or the Player Staking model that we’re working on right now. Imagine if you could stake tokens to a player on zkHoldem to get a portion of their profits in the game, which is actually a very SocialFi concept. We can absorb those users who don’t play Poker themselves into the ecological economic system at once, and allow them to use the idea of investing in tokens or NFTs to make a profit in this system. Conversely, for players on zkHoldem, they can run their fan community in this way, rather than just tying their earning model to playing cards.

CoinVoice: After the launch of the test product, the overall response is still good, can you share some of your latest developments?

Henry: The launch of Khartes L3 and the design of the second card game are at the heart of what we’re doing on the development side right now. Overall, our primary goal at zkHoldem is to improve the user experience to a level similar to that of the web2 platform, including significantly reducing gas fees, increasing transaction speeds, lowering the barrier to entry for web2 users, and so on.

In addition, the design of zkHoldem’s economic system and token model is also our main task this year. It’s not convenient to reveal too much at the moment, but the aforementioned DeFi and Player Staking will both play a key role in the future zkHoldem economic model.

CoinVoice: As one of the first dapps to use FHE, can you introduce why zkHoldem needs to use FHE, and what other “black technologies” does zkHoldem have to improve user experience in addition to FHE?

Henry: FHE stands for Fully Homomorphic Encryption, Chinese fully homomorphic encryption. You can think of it as a special form of encryption that allows the user to make calculations on the data without having to decrypt it.

FHE is an essential component for zkHoldem, because in order to achieve a truly decentralized shuffle, we need every user to participate in the process of shuffling. The application of FHE ensures that the order of the shuffle does not affect the result of the shuffle, nor does it give any unfair advantage to the player who shuffles later.

In addition to zero-knowledge proofs and homomorphic encryption, two technologies that play a central role in game logic, we are also exploring a number of new technologies that can improve the user experience of zkHoldem. For example, we worked with the Lumoz team to build the Khartes L3, which will be the first zk L3 based on the Polygon cdk on Manta Pacific. For example, account abstraction and Social Login, which are already more mature technologies, will be applied to zkHoldem and future games developed by Khartes Studio.

CoinVoice: There are many options for Layer 2, why did you choose Manta to build your product?

Henry: As one of the earliest investors of Khartes Studio, Manta has provided a very key help to the development of our team in terms of resources and technology, and we have gradually realized the ability and ambition of the Manta team in ecological construction throughout the cooperation process.

We feel that in the current context of L2 blooming, it would be much more beneficial for us to choose an early-stage ecosystem that has a pattern, dares to all-in, and is willing to provide support, rather than a mature ecosystem with stable liquidity but stronger competition.

As Khartes Studio, we are confident that we can continue to export competitive application products to the market, and we hope to prove our ability to attract traffic through cooperation with the new ecosystem, both from a product and operational perspective.

CoinVoice: Have you encountered some major difficulties in building a ZK-based full-chain chess and card game while taking into account a smooth user experience?

Henry: All I can say about this is “it’s hard to pass” haha. The entire development of zkHoldem can basically be said to be a process of continuous innovation and trade-offs. What we can do is to find the best solution to the problem as much as possible within the existing technical framework, after the trade-off between security and experience, and I think this is also a common situation faced by many Web3 builders.

There are still many features that need to be optimized and updated in the entire user flow of zkHoldem, including random matching, automatic check-out, which seem to be very basic features, but the reason is actually the development difficulties caused by the full chain nature of the game. In addition to the allocation of more development manpower, the solution of these problems also requires a lot of innovative thinking in design. In addition to smart contract engineers, our team also has dedicated cryptographers to solve these development challenges, which may be a special advantage for us as an application layer team.

CoinVoice: What are the main regions of the world that you are currently marketing in?

Henry: At this stage, we don’t really make a geographical distinction in our promotion, and we use crypto native attributes as a measure of promotion. At present, the KOLs and communities we work with cover different regions in Asia, Europe and the United States, but the common denominator is that they are interested in innovation and have a keen sense of new opportunities. We deliberately selected KOLs with this trait to work with, because we believe that they are the truly influential voices in the circle, and not only judged by the number of followers.

CoinVoice: As the market gradually recovers, what are your plans for various aspects such as product and market strategy?

Henry: Actually, I’ve already shared about this issue before haha, to sum it up:

On the product side, we will focus on improving the user experience of zkHoldem and introduce DeFi and Player Staking features in the next version to allow more ordinary users to participate in the game’s economic system. In addition, our second game, Psychiatric Center for the Degens, is also in the process of development, it is a full-chain trading card game based on Degen Culture, and the Twitter account of this game has been set up, interested friends can try to find it haha.

On the market side, this year we will focus on the Ignition Program and the airdrop mechanism in the future. Our Ignition Program is now live, and users can earn weekly points by playing cards and invitations, as well as receive weekly profit sharing and future token airdrops. It is expected that after the official deployment of Khartes L3, we will start a large-scale promotion campaign with partner KOLs, and we hope that everyone can participate!

zkHoldem

Khartes Studio

Full Chain Games

Source: CoinVoice Original