Introduction
Paima Engine allows connecting NFTs to games without requiring an NFT bridge - even if the NFT lives on a different layer of the same chain, or on a different chain entirely.
Motivation: many games, due to being data and computation heavy applications, run on sidechains, L2s and appchain as opposed to popular L1 blockchains. This is problematic because popular NFT collections (which people generally want to use in-game) live on the L1 (a different environment). A common solution to this problem is building an NFT bridge, but bridges not only have a bad reputation for fungible tokens which limits usage, the problem is even worse for NFTs where there is also a philosophical disconnect (if a bridge gets hacked, which is the canonical NFT? The one the hacker stole, or the bridged asset?)
Solution: instead of bridging NFTs, we instead provide many ways to connect NFTs directly into the game optimized for different scenarios.
No free lunch: note that all options come with trade-offs. Pick the one most appropriate for your project.
Active solutions
These solutions require actively monitoring multiple chains. These solutions require more computation resources and are more complex, but have lower trust assumptions.
This is possible by leveraging:
- EVM: Parallel EVM funnel
- Cardano: Carp funnel