The revolutionary blockchain game Insta-Pok3r creates a new era of Decentralization poker.

Since the beginning of 2024, the blockchain gaming industry has ushered in an investment boom, with over 20 projects successfully financed, totaling more than 100 million USD. A South Korean gaming giant has partnered with a public chain to launch a Web3 version of a classic game, marking the deep integration of traditional gaming and blockchain technology, paving new paths for innovation and development in the entire industry. In the wave of blockchain technology, the characteristics of security, transparency, and Decentralization provide new possibilities for online gaming. Recently, an innovative blockchain game called Insta-Pok3r has attracted industry attention; it achieves a real-time, secure, and trustless online poker game through encryption technology, and its potential impact on existing online poker games cannot be ignored.

Insta-Pok3r is a decentralized online poker game system designed to address the trust and fairness issues present in traditional online poker games. It generates verifiable random shuffling through related randomness, providing distributed services to multiple parties. The output of each party is private but can be publicly verified, ensuring the randomness and fairness of the cards in the poker game.

The innovation of Insta-Pok3r lies in its ability to allow users to play online poker in real-time environments at a low cost, without relying on any trusted third parties. This is supported by a committee of computing providers who run a multiparty computation (MPC) protocol, generating an encrypted arrangement of a deck of cards in advance during an offline phase where players' identities are unknown.

The core of Insta-Pok3r lies in its unique MPC protocol and the newly proposed Simple Verifiable Multi-Identity Encryption (SVME). Before the game starts, the MPC server collaborates in the offline phase to generate a card deck encryption arrangement based on Identity-Based Encryption (IBE) and produces a proof to demonstrate that the IBE ciphertext encodes a valid arrangement. In the online phase, players can request their IBE decryption keys and use these keys to decrypt their cards, a process that has a relatively low computational cost.

The offline sampling phase includes secret sharing of random unit roots, conflict checking, encryption, and proof generation. The MPC server first generates a secret sharing of random values, ultimately obtaining a large deck of cards through multiplication operations and reconstruction. To eliminate duplicate cards, the server calculates the pseudorandom function of the cards, checks for conflicts using a distributed PRF protocol, and ultimately obtains a permutation of 52 cards without duplicates. Then, the deck is encrypted using the distributed SVME encryption protocol, generating a tuple of SVME encryption and proof, which is submitted to the Blockchain.

The online retrieval phase includes player requests, key computation and aggregation, key acquisition, and decryption. When players join the game, they make a request on the chain to obtain the IBE decryption key. After receiving these requests, keypers calculate partial keys using their shares of the IBE master key, then collaboratively aggregate these keys and submit the aggregated decryption key to the chain. Players acquire the corresponding decryption key and ciphertext, and then locally decrypt their cards.

SVME is a key innovation in Insta-Pok3r that expands the existing concept of verifiable encryption, allowing for encryption based on multiple identities while keeping the size of the proof constant. This means that even in cases involving multiple parties, verifying the validity of the encrypted content does not require excessive resources.

The structure of SVME includes a multi-identity-based encryption (MIBE) scheme, polynomial commitment, proof techniques, and a new concise sigma proof system for connecting commitments and encryption. By using SVME, the Insta-Pok3r system is able to allow anyone to verify whether the distribution of cards is fair while protecting the privacy of the cards, ensuring fairness in the game.

The emergence of Insta-Pok3r poses a challenge to existing online poker platforms. Traditional online poker platforms often rely on centralized servers and algorithms to ensure fairness in games, but this model carries the risk of being hacked or cheated by the platform operators. Insta-Pok3r, through Blockchain technology and multi-party computation, achieves true Decentralization and transparency, significantly enhancing the security and fairness of the games.

SVME and IBE ensure the confidentiality and fairness of the cards before they are dealt. Only players with the correct key can decrypt and see their own cards, while other players or third parties cannot know the information of these cards. At the same time, through technologies such as zero-knowledge proof, the system can prove that the distribution of cards complies with the rules without revealing specific card information, thus ensuring the fairness of the game.

The application of this encryption technology not only prevents players from cheating but also enhances players' trust in the game, promoting the development of online poker games. The Insta-Pok3r system showcases the innovative application of blockchain technology in the field of online poker games, providing a great example for the development of blockchain technology in the gaming sector.

Although the Insta-Pok3r system addresses trust and fairness issues in online poker games to some extent, the performance and efficiency of the system still need further improvement. For example, the system consumes a certain amount of time and computing resources in the process of generating random arrangements and encryption, which may affect the gaming experience of players. All of this needs to be addressed by optimizing algorithms, improving hardware performance, and other means to enhance the performance and efficiency of the Blockchain system to meet the demands of practical applications.

Insta-Pok3r, as a successful attempt of Blockchain technology in the online gaming field, demonstrates the potential of Blockchain technology in enhancing game fairness and security. The emergence of Blockchain games will change the business model of the gaming industry by introducing cryptocurrency and smart contracts, making transactions between players simple, secure, and transparent. Players can earn cryptocurrency or virtual assets through the game and trade both in and out of the game, achieving a more equitable distribution of benefits between players and developers.

Blockchain technology has brought revolutionary changes to the gaming industry, solving issues such as unclear ownership of virtual items and high replicability in traditional games. Through the immutability of blockchain, players can ensure the uniqueness and immutability of virtual assets, thereby giving real value to virtual items. With the continuous development and improvement of technology, we have reason to believe that more interesting innovative blockchain games will emerge in the future.