# EVE Frontier - challenges, lessons and future of building an autonomous world on Eth... | Devcon SEA

- Channel: [Devcon](https://streameth.org/devcon)
- Date: 2025-10-09
- Duration: 25:44
- Topics: Science & Technology
- Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-B7DCH9FwlWw
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7DCH9FwlWw

## Description

CCP Games—the creators of the legendary space-based MMO EVE Online, home to millions of space merchants, pirates, and explorers—is building a new world, and it is going to live onchain and run on the EVM.

Hear from the CCP team as they discuss challenges, learnings, and open questions of building massive virtual worlds onchain—what to put onchain first? What game mechanics are best suited onchain? What are the unlocks?—as well as what EVE Frontier might bring to the Ethereum ecosystem.

Speaker(s): Justin Glibert, Hilmar Petursson
Skill level: Beginner
Track: Real World Ethereum
Keywords: Gaming, Autonomous World, eve, online

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Devcon SEA was held in Bangkok, Thailand on Nov 12 - Nov 15, 2024.
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## Transcript

[Music] thank you um okay um I come from CCP uh it's a company founded almost 30 years ago in Iceland and this is our mission we want to create for your worlds more meaningful than real life this is probably something that's going to take a 100 years um and it's very proactive uh but I assure you we actually believe it's a good thing if you were here for Justin's talk just earlier he was there for um digital civilization um we have created like a what could be a prototype of maybe not like a civilization scale digital civilization it's more like a digital nation of sorts uh it's a game we released 21 years ago it's called even on line um currently there are about like a million characters playing it it has a lot of transactions uh and it is actually the first game built on top of a database which was very controversial at the time um like I said we come from Iceland uh Iceland is a country that just recently has more people than sheep uh so um in our sort of uh coordinate system a million people is a lot uh it's almost three times uh the people that live in our country uh we also made other games over the years about 60 million people have played even other games this is the first first version of EV on line released uh summer 2000 uh this is what it looks like today this is a picture of our Guinness world record of the bigest spaceship soup ever created um this is basically an allout fight of 8,000 people uh we are have spent updating the game over these 21 years so about like 4,000 people have spent uh 21 years to uh build on top of this Basics we actually released yesterday where is the 50th big update to EV on line so if you want to check that out uh now is the time but the most important build thing that happens in line is that players it's a Sandbox you need to build stuff all the infrastructure in E line is built by players if I agregate these 21 years the millions of people that have played Etc it is enough to build 10 Pyramids of Giza nobody of course know how the pyrometer was built but by some estimation it would be that uh and uh that is really uh what why we are the most ex excited about uh the building that happens in this virtual sunbox and how we can enhance that um mainstream media has kind of adopted even online almost like a virtual Nation you see War reporting from bpc from Yahoo Etc where people are sort of uh delivering news from this digital civilization as if it's happening for real we've also had riots we've had economic collapses we have had all the things that Civilization should have uh this is story there are the third history book is now being written but you can buy the other two if you want to really really go down the rabbit hole I recommend this YouTube series Down The Rabbit Hole uh it's 6 hours very good for a long play night uh we're obsessing about like physical things because it's so virtual here's a little pyramid we're building on the shores of rikic we added uh second layer on year 20 so by year 30 we will have a third layer and by year 100 we'll have a pyramid on the shores of Iceland um so there's a lot uh that goes on with even line through the hood uh and it's shockingly uh not very technical um there's an aspect to Eve we call the eve effect which is uh combined of two things it's the friend you make and it's the skill you gained if you serve Eve players 73% of you players claim they have made a new like time friend from E on line uh it's to a point where this is the meme it's a spaceship game but the best ship in E on line is the Friendship uh this is a big topic uh as we all know by now loneliness is a is a mega issue it's the biggest Health crisis in the world vastly underreported uh we have discovered a formula of how you met a friend we're Mega nerds we met a or we we didn't make the formula uh it uh it's uh known in Psychology proximity frequency duration and intensity so Eve is very known for being super hardcore super hard death penalty Etc and it's actually this hardship that creates uh the Friendship so the when you survey e players why have you played this game for 21 years it is usually a story about a devastating loss where people had friends to pull them back from it or they gained friends to do that and if I if we ask players how do you self identify you would think PVP sandbox it would be like killing and building and exploring no it's actually helping others turns out when you make a PVP capitalistic death hellscape there just a lot of people that need help um uh and again if we serve a players the people that like to help others they enjoy IM online the most um very interesting often the friendships Elevate to various other Rel relationships uh here is me uh marrying people about a decade ago uh now the space Pope uh takes care of the mar uh this is what governance looks like in on line This is a council of Stellar management meeting this is a democratically elected Council of players you see me there squirming at the end the the guy talking here uh has PhD in AI the next guy to him has PhD and how mice make new memories um soci organizations are a huge thing in line uh here are the three top alliances they are the size of the UK military just to kind of uh compare social organizations he was obviously known for this uh it's much of alliances um because uh to kind of go anywhere in land not only is it the friendship it is the scale of the social organization that you belong to uh he was also a r to be more than a game with an API we created um massive amount of things have created that and we believe Eve uh is going to go on forever that brings us to e Frontier uh which is a new experience we are creating where we are going to get closer to the digital civilization justtin was talking about earlier and we hear here a little video uh that is going to take you through like a brief introduction of L if it plays always happens yeah welcome awakened I'm CB overload and I'm excited to Showcase what we've been building to you today before we begin please not that aled shown is under development and not fully representative of the final version of EF Frontier at launch so e Frontier what is it at its heart e Frontier is a space survival simulation an online multiplayer survival sandbox where players are locked in constant Conta conflict within a region of space known as the frontier the frontier is a place of Decay and danger a shattered post-apocalyptic landscape covered with mysterious ruins and invested by hostile AI at its Center sits the triner three hyper massive black holes Bound in a dance macabra perpetually shaping the fabric of the Galaxy and acting as the Bedrock for the endless Cosmic turmoil that players will try to survive within the frontier is a dark and dangerous place ancient structures from long gone civilization crumble and rot while Riders pilots who roam the frontier scare them for resources we are creating a deep Next Generation and player-driven sandbox e Frontier will give players the power to shape the experience as they see fit with an openly programmable World players will be able to configure in-game structures to their needs giving third party developers complete freedom to unleash their creativity this also extends to the economy players can create their own currencies establish private markets and convert their asset services and reputation into real world value e Frontier places a focus on the now with momentto moment decision- making having meaning and depth strategic combat has tactical flexibility positioning and environmental awareness matters with occlusion you're only aware of what you can see before you dodge incoming fire use celestial bodies as cover and execute Maneuvers to outflank your opponents will you be the defenseless minor unaware of the Hostile ship approaching from behind an asteroid or will you be their friend hiding in weight to Counterattack a common foe as a newly awakened Rider you'll be thrown into a desperate world full of death and suffering but also ripe with potential in a vast Galaxy of over 20,000 star systems your future is yours to forge I told them will you become an industrial Powerhouse uh okay so uh the journey to this point um has not been short I've he journaled um uh the journey to get here up until the point where me and Justin M uh but the journey up ahead is more exciting so I'm going to give that over to Justin to take us a bit through that thank you thank you helmar all right so as you saw in the video Frontiers players are rebuilding a broken world right and so in order for them to do that to not have like a shitty space life for 20 for like 20 more years we need to give them the tools to do so um a slightly longer term goal for us is for Frontier to outlast and Agro CCP games um hilar is going to die at some point and he's not going to take care of CCP games anymore and if we want e Frontier to last forever we need to lay down the social and technological foundations for this to happen so um let's talk a little bit about how etier works right like you saw a bunch of gam play there which is very early um we spent the last three years architecting and thinking through how we can actually pull that off as opposed to kind of like wishful thinking like oh yeah it's going to last forever which a lot of people do out there there so the strategy we've been leaning into is that we want the rules of the worlds to be grounded in what we call digital physics right what we mean by digital physics very similarly to the rules of physics of like this actual universe is composable rules onto which the entire univers is built and B whether it's the first party creator of the world or its inhabitants they must respect digital physics and this is where e theorum comes in right theorem provides a multiplayer computer that lets players build on top of the rules if you have seen the previous talk which I guess is prere now sorry if you weren't there um ethereum kind of like approaches a new perfect primitive in some sense and we think it's it should be the Bedrock for what ambitious words like E online a frontier should be built upon um and in the long term ethereum provides us the guarantees that the rules will be executed correctly meaning infer can grow Beyond CCP game and in in some ways like leaning into digital physics is a form of like via negativa like removing in order to get more um the rules being grounded in physics enables CCP games to provide less and that players create more right it's it's a shared set of rules that prevent gamebreaking Creations um gamebreaking creations at the design level right like no more of like my custom ship can destroy anything in a second because I added three zeros you know that that's the classic question that players ask on Discord it's like hm if we can build things why can't I just like add a bunch of zeros it would be like if an engineering student like went to University and was like well why can't we just like Snap our fingers and create like one Megaton worth of energy well bro there are there are rules and if you could do that you would just change the world forever we would have to adapt around it um and also prevents game praking creation at the infrastructure level uh believe it or not this is actually extremely hard um you don't want people's code to break the server the world is meant to be extended um and so deep at the technological architecture level we have to reflect that um all the way throughout the so I want to do like a little bit of uh of like what where are we at with this whole digital physics right so we're following a barable strategy onth less we're investing in uh a lot of time in very core systems to formalize and secure the whole world whether it's like key assets markets players andity in the world Etc on the right we invest a lot of time into making sure third partyy developers can tap into the world itself right through these uh structures in space you saw in the video called smart assemblies people can build war Gates smart storage units smart turrets and the way it works is it's not like we we put together this like parameterized program almost like roller coaster rides in a theme park Paris actually tap into The Primitives in order to build this themselves right it's on them to figure out what they can do with the rules of the worlds in order to rebuild that broken world and in the center we have a bunch of like really annoying stuff that we don't know how exactly we're going to go towards digital physics we're making progress there like things that require very low latency things that require a lot of information is symmetry um some of the markets today are still there and over time we kind of like want to squeeze the box in the middle and lend things that are on the left or on this the right you could imagine in in a short future everything but space travel and combat remains in this middle category and with a lot of effort in cryptography both sides should meet bringing us one step closer to e forever okay so I'm seeing I don't have that much time left so I will give a few very quick example of this via negativa what happens when you do that so in Eve online which is a different game but it's it's a it's useful to refer to it uh CCP Games built this very complicated contract system for things to happen in the world right and so instead what you can do is if you let people check that stuff happened and you let them do asset transfers they cannot build whatever contracts they want and make them as exotic as they want like CCP cannot just delete like what like 30,000 lines of C++ something like that just a ton of code just by doing that similarly in in E online there's a bunch of like player organization systems like corporations if you let people identify players control other subsystems you can now build whatever organization system you want you can just like remove all that code as well same with markets um but it also enables you to do things you couldn't do before players have been asking for being able to put their own structure in space that they kind of like program to do whatever they want and that's really hard to do if all you have access to is these like Cookie Cutter parameterized programs which is what most people do these days when they build um online world and so now in in Frontier you have um these smart assemblies that people can where where they can essentially tap into these like very lowlevel Primitives like attack transfer items warp in order to build essentially whatever they want so Frontiers physics is built on mud when people were asking earlier what does zxr do concretely to approach the vision I was laying down well that's the kind of stuff we do you know um we think virtual Wars are actually like heavily underrated and extremely important when it comes to our transition towards digital civilization and so um a in the zerox ecosystem has been building a framework for building very large application on ethereum a lot of states and where many participants can kind of like tap into what's going on and Frontiers asset logic and state and third party um extensions are all centralized in one mud deployment so the quick one1 is there's a shared mud world where CCP games build a core physics and a bunch of core data structures and then third party can come in and deploy within this world things like you know like new mini games or new Mission and reward system all of this logic is centralized into one big system that can coexist through like these rules that are enforc cross first party and third party and when you put the the lens of like well what what happened beyond the blockchain what we have is we have Eve world that is its own source of Truth and on the right we have all the stuff that is still in Gray in the diagram I showed you earlier that runs on these solar system servers the state of the chain is reflected in a chain database the game database is the good old world database that you guys put together 20 years ago and what we want to do is we kind of like want to reduce the size of the game database and increases the amount of State on the chain and over time um we're going to effectively do a progressive transfer of authority from the server to the chain over the next few years right um so with that I'll pass it back to hmar thank you yeah so um I'm not that yet as uh just pred but I have started quoting myself here I am sleep de Pride 20 years ago uh all the games focus on having people go up against monsters maybe in small group Eve is focus on building a society and providing the tools uh to and rules to operate it so this is very much Mission we're on still I mean we have some new funold tools to do this even better um so uh ultimately what we are here about is to provide tools for people to build societies to realize this vision of a digital Nation or a digital civilization that Justin was talking about earlier uh we have some really um uh Stellar early data we've been running a few hackathons where we've been blown away where people in 48 hours um have been able to hack together uh elements that take us maybe months or years to make an even line due to all the composability that you just just get naturally from operating on top of ethereum um and we spent a lot of uh uh time taking and Distilling all this knowledge from EV online where we you start to understand really what are the atomics of uh virtual world all the way going down to sort of taking analogy from physics into chemistry chemistry into biology Etc uh this element of open economy is something we've been very excited about uh in 2009 we introduced U something called plx into EV on line basically became kind of like a stable coin it isn't quite that but it's an analogous to that at least you could put money into the economy uh but there was no uh foreign export uh but that still happens if you've played an MMO there is rap real money trading around all MMOs it's a constant struggle I have since Dawn Of Time wanted to find a way so that we're not fighting this core Behavior which obviously you cannot change the rules after the fact but if we build something uh fundamental like that that's very exciting and then we have made announcements as we go through all this we will be open sourcing uh all of the code uh that both we uh inherit from you online in terms of engines Etc so again um if the goal is forever then open source uh seems to be the BL plan for that yep Justin all right I'll close this off so uh I think we're in the Sticks and Stones era of digital civilization right yet the digital is becoming more and more important and valuable right whatever you're into you you're realizing that we're moving more and more there and so I personally see e Frontiers at testbed for exploring how significant worlds can be made out of bits right like the reason why three years ago I got really nerd SN by talking with hmar and uh went to Iceland many times at Great uh expense and inconvenience is because I think that um this is not just like a cool side quest on the way to digital civilization I I think actually there's a typo here Frontier can be a massive stress test to ethereum both technologically and culturally right if we think of ethereum as this like very fancy payment rails what happens when it becomes almost like the home of Worlds that matter so I'm pretty excited about this um and just like EV on line was rooted in the philosophy of Worlds over theme parks you know from 20 years ago I think e Frontier will be able to explore this even deeper with digital physics and real assets so that's it for us thank you oh you want to do this thank you of appla yes call to action yeah so uh we have been doing play test but um uh on the 5th of December uh we're opening it up in a realway so um go sign up and uh stay tuned thank you all right thank you thank you you both stay on the stage we're going to do a Q&A and please scan QR code and then jump in and then just vote the questions you like or just throw out the questions okay the first one I have a history of fifth column robbery in E if I do this in Frontier and Bridge my winning to eum we be IR in the US hacking laws do you want uh yeah so uh even when we started uh even when we released Evan line we had these kind of problems uh Evan line is a futuristic dystopia world where there's a lot of shenanigans going on if you think uh the crypto industry is about uh scams and rock PS and whatever welcome to we online um dou K I promise um so um we've been up against this like through all the way where people were testing these boundaries and obviously they're going to get more tested um if there uh is some way that you can uh interface with the things you do any on line into the real world so as you sign up to e Frontier it is a little bit like climing climbing Mount Everest you will have to disclaim away all your rights to reasonable protection and reasonable expectation of coming out alive um I believe in a world where adult people are still allowed to do stupid stuff like um clim M Everest or to a triathlon or whatever these are all dangerous things uh even e Frontier will not be that dangerous uh but um this will be tested as it has been tested with online through 20 years okay sounds good uh next one why you guys selected Redstone chain uh uh so we've tested out many different things we've done ouren we've done our L2 uh but mostly we've been building on top of mud uh and mud does provide a very easy way to move between various chains so right now we are on Redstone and that's working out great obviously um Justin and crew have built Redstone to be very good format um so that's the main rational okay and the next one how about you you deal with the true put onchain is it sufficient how do you manage the like offchain and onchain so uh when we built te online it was it was the first game built on top of a database and we got a lot of um questions why we were doing that because databases were super slow at the time um especially we were using SQL server and it was kind of new and it was even slower um so we built the game around the fact that the data layer is low and it just so happens uh the way we build the game It just fits very elegantly uh on top of another slow database like a blockchain so uh so uh the game almost comes pre-built to fit very well to the current situation blockchains are about as bad when it comes to these things as databases were uh 25 years ago yeah and also another thing I add to that is all of this is going to be solved like this is not the hard problem the hard problem is figuring out what the right like atoms are when you build these worlds it's not like getting the transactions to go faster that's like actually like a very low dimensional problems you just have to like spend a bunch of time on it so in in many ways like that's not the biggest risk at all like yeah no uh the the biggest problem with building a game is making the game such that people want to play it believe me uh and how you do the database the score takes care of itself yeah the the how you build the database has very little to do with that so uh thoughts on letting llms participate in the game so already we have llms playing in online there's a a corporation in in online that is managed by an llm it's a group of people that ask uh a language model what they should do uh and follow the instructions so there is AI Incorporated is already a thing in imine most things you are concerned about in life in general there's an analogy in imine uh but Bing uh is obviously a mega Topic in uh mm most overall it ties into the Real Money Trade tonum Etc so obviously we are leveraging our 20 years of Bot fighting into e Frontier where we have engineered some of the fundamental digital physics uh in the world to create a sort of a CLE attack resistance opting in an MMO is a CLE attack on the economy so there's a lot of like simple attack like resistance mechanisms built into the game let let the BS in yeah so that the B can let be let in but in a way where humans stand a chance all right ladies and gentlemen this is e Frontier yes thank you for your Insight