Almost rolled over last month. Our guild has planned a small event with simple rules: whoever kills 10 designated monsters in a certain game will receive a token reward. When the results were executed, it was found that the gas fee for each verification of player data almost caught up with the reward amount. This made me ponder a question - how can an organization of YGG's size, their Superquests system, support thousands of people participating at the same time, without being overwhelmed by the cost of on-chain interaction?

To understand this, you have to first disassemble and see how YGG handles the game data on the chain. The most shrewd thing about them is that they don't intend to stuff every player operation onto the chain at all. The entire logic core is a hybrid architecture of "off-chain computation, on-chain proof".

For example. The game server is the examination room, recording all your answer trajectories - how much time is spent, the distribution of right and wrong, and the sequence of operations. What are traditional on-chain tasks like? For example, uploading all the 4K original films monitored in the examination room to the chain, everyone can retrieve and replay verification, which is absolutely fair, but the cost can squeeze people dry, and the network bandwidth cannot bear this kind of violence and transparency.

YGG is more cunning. They let the game server do your test locally and generate a concise transcript with a string of cryptographic signatures. This report card is then submitted to the on-chain smart contract for final review - the contract only checks the validity of the signature and the basic compliance conditions, no matter how you answer the questions. It is equivalent to condensing the entire 4K monitoring into a PDF stamped with the official seal, which not only ensures credibility, but also cuts the amount of data on the chain to a fraction of the original.

There are three key support points for this plan. The first is a trusted execution environment to ensure that no one can cheat or tamper with the report card when the game server generates it; the second is zero-knowledge proofs or similar cryptographic tools, which allow on-chain contracts to verify authenticity without looking at the original data; The third is the event triggering mechanism, which only submits proof when the player reaches a key node, and the usual small actions do not touch the chain at all.

What does this mean for the average player? The threshold for participation has been lowered. You don't have to pay high gas fees to submit task progress, and many times you don't even feel the existence of the blockchain - the reward will automatically arrive after defeating monsters, and the experience is close to traditional games, but the assets are indeed lying in your wallet. For builders, this is a replicable path: if you want to build an on-chain incentive system, don't go all in the whole chain as soon as you come up, leave high-frequency interactions off-chain first, and only throw key proofs and asset settlements on-chain.

But this system is not without cost. The security of off-chain computing relies on specific infrastructure, and once that layer of trusted environment is breached, cheat data can be disguised as legitimate proofs to blend in. In addition, while simplifying the verification process saves gas, it sacrifices some transparency - you can't see how others complete the task, you can only trust the final result given by the system. Whether this trade-off is suitable for your project is up to you to decide.

Back to the scene of the small rollover in our guild. Now that I think about it, if I hadn't insisted on uploading every kill record to the chain, but asked the game server to count "who completed 10 kills" first, and only put the hash value and signature of this list on the chain, the cost could be saved by more than 90%. YGG's super task system actually industrializes this idea - using a mature technology stack and standardized processes to allow more projects to be quickly accessed, rather than starting from scratch every time.

When the technical cloak is peeled off, the core is revealed: not all data is worthy of expensive on-chain storage, and the only things that really need to be put on the chain are those key proofs of trust and asset ownership. YGG used this combination to pull Web3 game incentives back from idealism to the track of sustainable operation. As for how far this road can go, it depends on the maturity of the underlying infrastructure and the verification of more practical cases.