Openfort vs Other Solutions
In the rapidly evolving realm of blockchain gaming, numerous solutions are vying for a slice of the pie. Among them, Openfort has carved a unique niche, focusing on providing a seamless, game-centric wallet experience. Here’s a comparative look at how Openfort stands tall against other industry contenders.
A Primer on Openfort
Openfort pioneers a groundbreaking in-game transaction paradigm, embodying a game-specific, headless wallet. This brainchild, utilizing blockchain fundamentals, mirrors a transaction-as-a-service model for games, streamlining transactions via API endpoints, aiming for a unified player journey.
The Openfort Edge
- Developer Experience first: Unlike conventional setups, Openfort understand and works with a diverse number of technology providers to seamlessly help you develop the innovation you have in mind.
- Hyperstructure-Based Infrastructure: A step beyond, Openfort’s infrastructure is rooted in hyperstructures, simplifying digital asset access, enhancing liquidity, and broadening network value.
- Player-Centric Approach: By revamping both player authentication and payment frameworks, Openfort addresses the intricacies of a web3 game setup.
Competitior Analysis
We categorize the present strategies into two main categories:
1) Verticalize (Gaming and Gamified Experiences) vs. Generic Meaning generic wallet solutions for applications with varying methods for managing private keys (MPC, KMS, etc.), while verticalize includes a comprehensive suite of products from which games can benefit, usually including wallets -other services may encompass inventory and currency minting, indexers, white-label marketplaces, etc.
2) External Owned Accounts (EOA) Wallets vs. Smart (Contract) Wallets A lot is written about the difference between an EOA and a Smart Wallet and the differences it provides. You can read more here.
Openfort is pioneering the first gaming-centric wallet built to make wallets effectively 'invisible' to players, simplifying their experience. Let's take a deeper look at the current solutions:
EOA Wallet & Generic
These solutions emphasize private key management over user experience. Unlike Openfort, they lack optimizations like gas sponsoring and transaction batching, essential for an enhanced player journey.
| Openfort | Privy | Particle Network | Web3Auth | Turnkey | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Account | Smart Account | EOA | EOA | EOA | EOA |
| Signer | KMS | SSS | TSS | SSS/TSS | MPC |
| Game Integration | ✅ | ⚠️ Only web | ⚠️ Only Unity | ✅ | ⚠️ Only API |
| Gasless Transactions | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
| Zero wallet popups | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
The wallet provides a smooth onboarding experience but carries all the limitations of creating an EOA instead of a smart contract wallet. They have no options without their UI, neither optimizations in the player experience like gas sponsoring, batching of transactions, etc. It's literally a burner/hot wallet.
Most of the aforementioned options are only focused on improving the user authentication and onboarding. In the process of creating a wallet, it generates simple EOA without any programmability or means to enhance the UX. This, while straightforward, has several limitations on the player’s experience and wallet management.
EOA Wallet & Game-Specific
Here are more complete solutions towards gaming and include things like marketplaces, inventory, etc. While these solutions offer game-specific features, they lack the technological edge of smart accounts seen in Openfort, which leads to vendor lock-in and limited external solution interactions.
| Openfort | Stardust | Venly | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Account | Smart Account | EOA | EOA |
| Custodianship | Custodial/ non-custodial | Custodial | Custodial/ non-custodial |
| UI Integration | ✅ | ✅ | ⛔ |
| Gasless Transactions | ✅ | Custodial | Relayer |
| Zero wallet popups | ✅ | Custodial | ⛔ |
| Use any Smart Contracts | ✅ | ⚠️ | ⚠️ |
| Ecosystem Integration | ✅ | ⛔ | ⚠️ Only Wallet API |
| Marketplace as a Service | ⛔ | ✅ | ✅ |
These solutions offer a complete suite of gaming tools ranging from NFT minting, marketplaces, indexers and/or wallets. While complete in many aspects, they are still relying on EOA instead of Smart accounts which limits some capacbilities for the end user.
Smart Wallet & Generic
These providers are delving into smart contract wallet solutions but lack a defined vision, contrasting with Openfort’s clear focus on providing a tailored solution for the gaming industry.
| Openfort | Thirdweb | ZeroDev | Alchemy | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Signer | In-house & signer support | Signer support | Signer support | Signer support |
| Gasless Transactions | ✅ | ⚠️ Only on network tokens | ✅ | ⚠️ Only on network tokens |
| Zero wallet popups | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ⛔ |
| Token Bound Account Support | ✅ | ⚠️ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
| Gaming Integrations | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
| Headless wallet support | ✅ | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
| Account Abstraction Infra | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
These organizations appear to be diversifying its features with the aspiration that one may gain traction, rather than being driven by a definitive vision and addressing a specific problem. Broadly speaking, their offerings can be characterized as generic solutions that lack both innovative elements and a focus on client-centricity.
Smart Wallet & Game-Specific
Although focusing on gaming use cases, these organizations build their own gaming wallet brands, which may impose restrictions on games and players, unlike Openfort's open, customizable approach.
| Openfort | Sequence | Immutable Passport | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Signer | KMS (Non-custodial) | TSS (Torus Network) | ⚠️ No details |
| Gasless Transactions | ✅ | Relayers | ⚠️ No details |
| Zero wallet popups | ✅ | ✅ | ⚠️ No details |
| Headless Account | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
| Account Abstraction Infra | ✅ | In-house infra | ⚠️ No details |
| Token Bound Account Support | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
| Use any auth platform | ✅ | ⛔ | ⛔ |
The most constraining part is that these providers are buidlign their own gaming wallet brand versus openfort offering their tech to be completely branded on top. Anyone could build their own Immutable Passport, like Beam (Merit Circle) did with Openfort tech.
Openfort’s Unique Positioning
The Openfort's mission is to grow the gaming economies. We believe that by building a transaction-as-a-service platform we'll be expanding the pie for thousands of games looking to build a fun and engagin games where players like to participate in the economies they generate.
Our solution integrates with all popular onboarding tools as well as offers our own solution to ensure a smooth player onboarding. After signing in, users will obtain a smart account rather than a regular wallet, providing them with advanced functionalities.
We’re building the infrastructure needed to have hit games like Clash of Clans. We prioritize and build a comprehensive product to become crucial part of any ambitious game. All without vendor lock-in and the piece of mind that if we cease to exist all our deployd infraestrcutured will still be running because it's build on top of blockchain primitives.
We provide SDKs and APIs for the most powerful smart account features, including gasless transactions, transaction batching, pop-upless experience, ability to build-your-own-gaming ID, and much more.
If you have more questions/ideas/queries, join our Developer Discord and let us know there. Furthermore, you can follow us on Twitter for our updates as we keep shipping.