Layer 2 Scaling Technology

The main problem, up until now, for building a poker playing decentralized app on the Ethereum blockchain has been gas fees (i.e. transaction costs) of using the network.

Transaction costs can be completely prohibitive to the use of an application like this on-chain. For example, if you sit down to play with $100 worth of Eth and after each poker hand when the transactions settled you ended up with $13 worth of Eth lost to transaction fees... there is no way that could be an practical or enjoyable experience.

In comes ZK rollups, using Zero Knowledge proof technology, we can drastically reduce transaction fees, by 100-200x, while maintaining the security and decentralization of Ethereum main-net.

This will mean only pennies (or less) per hand lost to transaction costs, so playing on-chain becomes practical. Also transaction speeds are much, much faster, settling almost instantly.

We have devised an architecture utilizing ZK rollups, that we can implement either with StarkWare or zkSync that brings those transaction costs down enough that playing on-chain is practical.