Openfort vs Other Solutions
TLDR Openfort is a headless game-specific wallet that leverages the advantages of blockchain primitives and standards to offer the closest to transaction-as-a-service for games.
We provide the best in-class aproach to unify the player experience by leveraging our API endpoints to manage transactions and variables like gas fees, signatures and permissions.
We want to preface our comparison with a few things:
- The meaning and value of gaming to adopt crypto/web3 resides in that assets are now stored in the network and can be read and written by anyone.
- We offer a novel infrastructure for decentralized, user-driven, and value-rich digital ecosystems, aligning with the adoption of web3/crypto in sectors like gaming. Openfort's solution, based on the concept of hyperstructures, aims to simplify access to digital assets, enhance liquidity, and expand value from the network, supporting a more open, accessible, and valuable gaming environment.
We’re rethinking the game stack by both focusing on the player authentication and the payment infrastructure. Two of the most complex and intertwine concepts for a web3 game.
In contrast to a high number of infrastructure providers who are primarily creating general-purpose wrappers and solutions around existing technology, our approach at Openfort is distinct. We're striving to innovate in areas such as asset ownership and onchain payment, where we see the greatest potential to challenge and reshape the current gaming paradigm.
| Openfort | Embedded Wallet (Magic, Privy, Web3Auth) | Web3 Gaming Back-ends (Stardust, Venly, Sequence) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Game-specific wallet | ✅ | ⛔ | ✅ |
| Same experience independent of custodial setup | ✅ | ⛔ Limited to EOA wallets | ⚠️ Limited to signer setup |
| UI integration (eg. branding, logo, theme, email, etc.) | ✅ | ⚠️ Limited UI | ⚠️ Limited UI |
| Agnostic wallet support | ✅ | ⛔ Only EOA | ⚠️ Requires EOA to initiate txs |
| Multi Device support | ✅ | ⚠️ Depends on chosen wallet | ⚠️ Only through EOA retrieval methods |
| Bring your own auth or use ours | ✅ | ⚠️ EOA only | ⚠️ Opinionated login via 3rd party provider |
| Gasless player experience | ✅ | ⛔ | ⚠️ Yes but centralized relayers |
| No vendor lock-in | ✅ | ⛔ | ⚠️ Ecosystem lock-in or locked by the API setup |
| NFTs as wallets | ✅ | ⛔ | ⚠️ Ecosystem lock-in or locked by the API setup |
We categorize the present strategies into two main categories:
1) Embedded Wallet Solutions, generic wallet solutions for applications with varying methods for managing private keys (MPC, KMS, etc.).
2) Web3 Gaming Backend-as-a-Service, 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.
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:
Embedded Wallet Solutions
- Magic Link vs Openfort This solution leverages Amazon KMS as a wrapper to enable players to log in via their social media accounts. It helps platforms offer non-custodial wallets by outsourcing the hosting of private keys in their KMS.
Magic 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.
- Web3Auth vs Openfort This solution uses Multi-Party Computation (MPC) to allow players to use social logins. Instead of relying on a KMS, it distributes keys among a network of nodes that hold shares of the keys.
You could consider it a decentralize non-custodial solution in the way they deal with keys, but it offers the same limited wallet experiences after the onboarding. Moreover, like other embedded wallet solutions, their business model could become too pricey once you start onboarding thousands of players.
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 External Owned Accounts (EOA) without any programmability or means to enhance the UX. This, while straightforward, has several limitations on the player’s experience and wallet management.
Web3 Gaming Backends
- Stardust vs Openfort This platform offers a custodial solution and a holistic ecosystem approach. It provides smart contract APIs, marketplace endpoints, indexers, and a custodial wallet solution. While very complete, their approach only makes sense if you’re looking to integrate every single offering of their product.
You’re de facto trapped to their product decisions, set of APIs and can have the engineering decision on how your system is built, most importantly you're lock in with their other set of product that do not work with other solutions. Moreover, their wallet solution is custodial which means your players don't really own the assets (nor the web3 players have the capacity to play the game) and you might bear the legal and compliance footnotes.
- Sequence vs Openfort A hybrid of Web3auth and closed-source smart contract wallet. Sequence offers infrastructure to deal with the player experience, including their a relayer system and batch transaction processing. Similar to Stardust they also offer a full game kit that allows you to integrate a marketplace solution and indexers.
Sequence is currently not open-sourced and has built their own proprietary infrastructure adding non-standard codebase to function. Their webapp wallet also forces games to interact with popup to verify and sign transactions as well as having their UI popups interfere with teh players experience.
- Immutable Passport vs Openfort This gaming wallet is exclusive to the IMX ecosystem and it adopts a 'Steam account' approach by integrating the player's profile within the immutable X ecosystem and enabling social logins.
Passport locks the games and players in their ecosystem limiting it's functionality to their own gaming kit. It might limit the ambition to build your own gaming ecosystem or choose the most competent integrations stack. Moreover, it also imposes the look and feel with their games, limits the usability to NFTs and makes game studios hold the ecosystem token to operate.
- Venly vs Openfort provides web3 development tools, including wallet solutions, marketplace solutions, NFT tools. They are sector agnostic but their wallet are simple EOAs and require of additional relayer infraestructure to sponsor gas.
Venly solution is limiting in their wallet approach as it doesn't add proggrammability to their wallets making them more suitable for being local or burner wallets instead of fully fledge wallets.
- Other Providers (Mirage, Thirdweb, etc.) vs Openfort We wanted to add a fourth point to agnostic web3 infrastructure providers that also happen to offer game kit solutions. Differentiating between their technologies and nuances that are challenging to distinct from a tech perspective.
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.
Web3 Gaming Infrastructure provides specialized services tailored for the web3 gaming sector. From wallets and white-label marketplaces to indexing services and smart contract creation, enterprises in this domain aim to establish themselves as the comprehensive toolkit essential for developing your web3 gaming experience.
We're going above and below with Openfort
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.