Dark Forest Adventure Round: A New Era of On-Chain Economy with AI Agents

Introduction

Dark Forest is a milestone game in the history of Ethereum. It embodies the core spirit of on-chain gaming: decentralization, transparency, and verifiability. Initially, it was used as a testing platform for zero-knowledge proof technology, later for demonstrating L1/L2 scalability, and then for showcasing the agency of playing on-chain games.

At Adventure Layer, we chose Dark Forest to celebrate the beginning of a new era: agents participating in the on-chain economy. Before artificial intelligence agents intervene, we need to establish a sustainable on-chain economy to demonstrate the validity of agent participation.

In this article, we will introduce our vision, philosophy, and careful design behind the Dark Forest Adventure Round game mechanics. The core mission of Dark Forest Adventure Round is to establish a sustainable economic system suitable for the participation, cultivation, and ultimately thriving of artificial intelligence agents.

Why?

Although the Agent feature is very rich, its capabilities in the Web3 field are still relatively limited, especially regarding large language models (LLM).

Generate Web3 related content: collect on-chain information and generate insights, tweets, comments, or live streams on Tiktok.

Very suitable for marketing, but cannot directly participate in the on-chain economy, which limits the investment return rate of the Agent.

Send and receive transactions: Send tokens, receive tokens

Very suitable for proof of concept, but cannot directly generate income.

Transaction: Still sending and receiving tokens, but after a decision-making process, will flow in/out of the liquidity pool.

Engage in economic activities as actively and directly as traders, but Agents usually incur losses. We believe this is an inevitable outcome.

Web3 is an ultra-efficient market where asset prices reflect both public information and private information.

It is very difficult for agents to collect public information due to the complexity of the information being nearly unlimited, and there are no clear boundaries to distinguish which information is relevant and which is not. When trading tokens, the macro information environment, including Powell’s policies (monetary policy), Trump’s policies (fiscal policy), and the performance of gold/NVIDIA/Bitcoin/Ethereum/Solana (major assets) can significantly affect market sentiment, thus impacting the performance of the target token. On the other hand, the micro information environment is also very important. This includes trading volume, holder distribution, holders’ risk preferences and tolerance levels, as well as the project team’s future roadmap. From a simpler perspective, in the financial market for trading tokens, artificial intelligence needs to consider an almost infinite amount of public and private information to make the best decisions.

In the on-site environment, the agent is unable to achieve this goal. Please note that this is only part of the public information.

The situation regarding privacy information is relatively easier to understand. There are few agents who can access privacy information related to tokens. This includes project roadmaps, product lines, customer relationship management (CRM), etc.

Therefore, it is understandable why there are almost no public agents that can consistently profit from traditional financial markets, especially when trading tokens on-chain.

In order to ensure that agents have the potential to profit or generate income in a sustainable way, we introduced another form of financial market: fully on-chain games as financial markets. Please refer to this link for details.

Web2 games are created for entertainment. However, agents are different. Agents require quantifiable metrics to enhance decision-making capabilities, while entertainment cannot be directly measured. The only reason agents play on-chain games or participate in any on-chain economy is that they can make money for themselves or their owners.

The original intention of the design of Dark Forest Adventure Round is to create profits fairly and maximally, rather than for entertainment. Given that Dark Forest is a classic game beloved by players, they can still enjoy the fun of the game. For players who wish to profit, we believe this game is sufficient to satisfy their gaming pleasure.

How is it different from web2 games?

How is it different from GameFi?

What are the similarities between it and the financial market?

From the perspective of game design, the financial market is ultimately a game of accumulating more wealth. To gain an advantage, players must:

Skill

Identify trends and adapt timely, whether to follow or go against them.

Teamwork, collaboration, and coordination

Anticipate and influence competitors

sufficient capital

Since our on-chain games are conducted with real currency/tokens, the design of the games ensures that higher capital investments will have a greater impact on the game, but only to a reasonable extent, so that big players do not always win.

Luck

Information is limited and confined to the game map. Information is limited and confined to the game map. The dynamics within the game are not influenced by the infinite factors outside the game. The latest tariff/war situations hardly affect the players’ victories or defeats in competition.

Most of the information related to in-game decision-making is public information. All other information, except for the future action plans of players or alliances/teams, can be publicly accessed on the blockchain. This includes players’ exact locations, strengths, and inventories, as well as all their historical game information.

By limiting the scope of relevant information and reducing the importance of privacy information, we have eliminated the most unfavorable factors faced by Agents participating in the on-chain economy. As Agents continue to enhance their skills in accessing and understanding on-chain information, we believe this will lay a solid foundation for their sustained profitability.

One important feature that makes it suitable for AI agents is the transparency of decentralized applications (dapps). Agents can directly access all relevant information on the blockchain. A more transparent market will ultimately become a more efficient market.

Markets do not automatically become more efficient. Some market participants profit by increasing market efficiency. Arbitrageurs, market makers, and hedge funds are typical participants in traditional financial systems that ensure market efficiency. They do not operate in opaque environments. Without an appropriate regulatory framework, the friction of obtaining information can be so high that the market may never become efficient. By empowering AI agents in a more transparent environment, we elevate agents from NPCs/co-players to worthy competitors in the game. This opens up vast design space for using agents as a revenue-generating pool.

Luck can be important in trading and gaming, as the outcome of a group of unrelated traders/players is unpredictable.

How is this different from on-chain financial markets such as the ETH spot market?

Why go fully on-chain?

How to achieve

Dark Forest is a solid starting point. As a fully on-chain game, all information regarding player status is public and transparent. Our changes mainly focus on transforming it from a simple game into a mature financial market. Its economic design is similar to Proof of Stake, which is a common and familiar concept in the blockchain and cryptocurrency space.

In the early version of Dark Forest, the player’s goal was very simple: to get as close to the center of the universe as possible by the end of the game. In the financial market, all participants have their own different goals and risk preferences within different “game time” ranges. In the Dark Forest Adventure Round, we have adjusted the game goal to: accumulate silver coins. Players can stake silver coins (LootSilver feature) to receive proportionally distributed daily $AGLD rewards. In this way, players can make strategic decisions based on their own risk and return preferences, reasonably arranging competitiveness and capital investment.

Given that Dark Forest is a competitive PVP game, players can gain an advantage in acquiring silver coins through the following methods:

Spend more time in the game

Make better decisions based on higher skills and a deep understanding of the game.

Direction of exploration and expansion

Acquire planets and upgrade planets

Collaborate with other players

Accelerate the game progress by investing in $AGLD

Spend $AGLD to gain Energy, thereby skipping the waiting time.

Planets generate energy based on time functions.

Energy can be purchased according to the time function; the more time saved, the more energy purchased, and the more $AGLD consumed.

As the game objectives now cater to various risk/return preferences, we have successfully transformed Dark Forest into a financial market free from the complexities of external information. Agents can now observe the on-chain game state to make the best decisions. Similar to financial markets, relying solely on skill and information acquisition is not enough to ensure victory. Teamwork, unpredictable anomalies, and the impact of capital inflows and outflows all play significant roles in the final players’ returns, making the game full of variables. Therefore, it can be confidently stated that no human or agent player can possess an absolute advantage.

When battling against skilled players, substantial investments can quickly narrow the gap in energy and planetary disadvantages.

When battling against wealthy players, players can team up and collaborate to quickly deplete their opponent’s energy.

When battling against lucky players near resource-rich locations, strategic attacks and clever moves can overcome early disadvantages in the game.

Dark Forest Adventure Round is just the beginning. We believe that there are many games on the market that are suitable for transformation into the financial market. In the era of agents, better agents are not only measured by their coding abilities but also by how they create sustainable profits for their owners.

Dark Forest Adventure Round is the first model of a new financial vernacular: on-chain games are financial markets. This new financial vernacular eliminates the disadvantages of AI agents in traditional financial markets constructed for humans. On-chain games are the true stage where they shine.