Blockchain Alignment
Choosing a blockchain for EVE Frontier required an assessment of our long-term vision, where the Frontier persists through a foundation in player sovereignty, adaptability, and permanence.
Evolving from Project Awakening, which was conceived in 2021, EVE Frontier was initially developed in the Ethereum ecosystem, given the maturation of its technology at the time and its ethos of decentralization and security. Much has been learned from this process, and the experience has helped inform our future direction.
For the next stage of development, EVE Frontier will be moving to Sui, a Layer-1 blockchain that was built from the ground up for low latency and scalability. Its object-centric model and extensible architecture would unlock the responsiveness and persistence needed for a living and evolving virtual world that is EVE Frontier.
Moving to Sui opened vast opportunities, but it also required careful consideration of validator decentralization and ecosystem maturity. Developing a project on the scale of EVE Frontier today puts us in a unique position, where the challenge lies not in a scarcity of options, but in discerning which blockchain is best aligned with our goals.
ARCHITECTURAL APPROACH A key factor in choosing Sui was its protocol design, which focuses on delivering a highly secure, object-centric blockchain as opposed to the more traditional smart contract-centric approach.
At its core, EVE Frontier is targeting 100,000 unique star systems, each with a varying number of planetary objects, asteroids, and NPCs. In this world, we allow players and third-party developers to build ships, bases, and other infrastructure.
Sui’s approach allows each object on the Frontier to have its own identity, ownership, and lineage. The protocol allows the core rules of the universe to be enshrined in each object, rather than stored within a monolithic contract. These concepts become even more interesting as the game proceeds down the path of crafting dynamic, unique digital items, as well as enabling players to deploy their own in-game currencies with defined rulesets.
PERFORMANCE Using EVE Online as a baseline for transaction volume, it was essential to select a blockchain that prioritizes performance — even if that tradeoff is for some centralization initially.
Speed and precision are crucial during battle, so throughput and finality must be considered at a premium within the gaming space. Sui’s high requirements for its validators ensure this level of performance, in that both transactions per second (TPS) and time-to-finality (TTF) are maintained.
Further to this, Sui has the ability to provide horizontal scaling, facilitated by its parallel processing of transactions rather than handling each transaction sequentially. In the battle for survival, war is not a sequential turn-by-turn affair. As more and more of the game is recorded onchain, the ability to parallel-process transactions will become a core requirement for the game to operate at scale.
One of the other advantages of Sui in this regard is that predictable, low gas costs—a must during times of war. Players will battle against each other and the environment in times of conflict, but they should not have to battle against transaction confirmations.
SECURITY
Security becomes increasingly important as more of the community and third-party developers create in-game assets, mods, and digital collectibles. Strict enforcement of rules, even before deployments, acts as a major failsafe to avoid introducing vulnerabilities and attack vectors into the game.
Move, the programming language used by Sui, enforces strict security measures at the compiler during the development phase. This can provide a much higher level of security for third-party development by removing many of the attack vectors that can be accidentally deployed in a smart contract, such as re-entrancy errors, before the code is deployed into the shared environment.
This type of security becomes increasingly important as we invite the community and third-party developers to deploy new objects into the game that others on the Frontier can interact with. This approach greatly reduces the threat of malicious code having a negative impact on the inhabitants of the Frontier.
DEVELOPER ECOSYSTEM
With the Frontier being a blank canvas in which the entire world is to be created and crafted by inhabitants, it was important to partner with a future-focused developer community deeply aligned with the EVE way of thinking.
Move is likely to appeal to developers who love the data-rich complexity of building in the EVE Frontier universe. Move gives developers the tools to safely model ownership, scarcity, and permanence, just like in the physical world, making it a natural fit for tackling the rich data and complexities of building in the EVE Frontier universe.
Comprehensive developer tooling that promotes user experience, easing in new users while being versatile for advanced developers. Move is a typed programming language with syntax inspired by Rust. Sui offers an increasingly comprehensive set of developer tooling to help onboard new users.
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