Introduction
What is Honeycomb
Honeycomb is an infrastructure protocol that provides a set of on-chain programs and SDKs to enable game studios and developers to scale web3 games to main-stream adoption on the Solana blockchain.
This platform is compatible with all of the Metaplex Non-Fungible Token (NFT) standards, including the Programmable Asset Class (pNFT), Compressed NFTs (cNFT) and Semi-Fungible Tokens (SFT).
Check out the recent Helius blog on Honeycomb Protocol: https://www.helius.dev/blog/gaming-how-solana-is-changing-the-playfield#honeycomb
The Problem
Currently the Solana game developer experience is extremely fragmented, requires a deep knowledge of blockchain development and is not scalable for mainstream adoption due to the on-chain fees for a large player base.
Honeycomb is a infrastructure development toolkit for the Solana gaming ecosystem by the development team Tumi Labs. Through our experience with the new genre of games on web3, we’ve determined that the game life-cycle is made of the following core functions:
- Idle player rewards (staking)
- Quests (missions)
- Loot Boxes or RNG Prizes (raffles)
- Guilds or Party
- Game Tokens (custodial and non-custodial)
- Mutable Digital Assets
- Issue and Manage Digital Assets
- Player Profiles
- Fee Structure
The Solution
Honeycomb provides a suite of on-chain Programs and state-compression tools that handle all crucial game lifecycle functions and compossibility with the SVM. All programs are designed to be interoperable, modular and are packed with tons of different settings to allow for customization to meet your game development needs.
Due to the complexity of on-chain development, we built an SDK so that you can start building games on Solana with almost no web3 experience. Q1 2024 we will be releasing UI kits that will allow developers to quickly integrate Solana.
All programs are managed with our Master Program: Hive Control – that manages the project directory, all player profiles and the optional fee structure for your game.
Our tools are broken into the following categories:
State Compression (Build to Scale)
Q2 2023 Solana Labs released literature for Compressing Digital Assets with Concurrent Merkle Trees, as this would significantly reduce the cost of minting NFTs on SVM. Our team quickly saw the potential of creating scalable solutions using a generalized state-compression.
This was first tested on one of our main programs within Hive Control: Player Profiles
Our benchmarks for Player Profiles prior to compression had a player fee of 0.0118 SOL and after it was reduced to 0.000009 SOL (~1300x reduction in costs). We will be implementing this across all of our programs in Q4 2023 - Q1 2024 in order to create the first scalable gaming solution directly on SVM.
Due to the lack of dev-tools, our team has built a library of Proc Macros in Rust for the Anchor Lang which allows our team to integrate compression throughout all of Honeycomb Protocol.
Github
https://github.com/honeycomb-protocol
All Honeycomb on-chain programs will be open-sourced in the near future. Access to the repo is only available on a request basis: hello@tumilabs.com