Auto Tower Defense Base Bridge
Web3 games must be as cheap & accessible as possible to achieve mass-adoption. Our project's bridge allows users to play on Redstone (cheap) while making in-game purchases with Base USDC (accessible).
About
The problem it solves Currently, Auto Tower Defense is a completely on-chain game that lives on Redstone, which is a very cheap (and soon to be very fast) chain built by Lattice. However, requiring users to bridge funds from a popular to a relatively unknown chain just to make an in-game purchase is far to much friction to require players to go through. Given that Base USDC is one of the most accessible assets too acquire, our solution was to build a bridge that allowed players to pay on Base and receive their in-game asset (electricity) on Redstone. Of course, the bridge also allows players to sell their electricity on Redstone in exchange for USDC on Base. Ultimately, we want the on-chain experience of the game to be completely non-existent to players who don't care to look under the hood, and allowing users to pay on Base is one step towards this.
How it's made
Challenges we ran into Initially, the plan was to build out the bridge using Relay.Link. However, given the shortcomings in their SDK when it comes to arbitrary contract exectution, we decided to build our own relay. As it turned out anyway: if the user already trusts the makers of the game, and you are only bridging from one chain, relaying through Relay.Link doesn't add much benefit. Unfortunately, this realization came halfway through development, causing us to scrap the bulk of our initial spec and start from scratch. Though, because of the thoroughness of our initial research and spec, designing and implementing our own architecture came relatively quickly.