Welcome to the @OriginalWorks sponsored writing contest!

Status: CLOSED (Continuing to accept late entries.)

Accepted Languages:

• English.

Start Time: ~9 PM ET, Saturday
End Time: EXTENDED: ~9 PM, Friday

End Time - Extended

Although the contest is closed, we understand that some users had difficulty due to HF20. Therefore, over the next few days, if you have made an article please go ahead and leave it here as a reply and it will be added to the list and taken into account.

Please remember, although this has been a difficult time for many users, it is to the benefit of this network to continue implementing updates that will make Steemit even better! Let's all band together and cheer on the people working hard to ensure that our network is the best it can be!

Special Twitter 0.5 STEEM bonus!
Details outlined at the bottom.

This is a call to all great Steemit writers! Xaya has sponsored a Steemit writing contest!

Xaya is formerly known as Chimaera! The awesome gaming blockchain is back on Steemit!

Please make sure to read the contest topic carefully. Good luck!

Prize Pool Total: 1150 STEEM

Prizes: 900 STEEM + 250 STEEM (100 bonuses of 2.5 STEEM!) + Twitter Bonus (Details Below)

• 1st Place: 68 STEEM
• 2nd Place: 63 STEEM
• 3rd Place: 56 STEEM
• 4th Place: 52 STEEM
• 5th Place: 50 STEEM
• 6th Place: 45 STEEM
• 7th Place: 42 STEEM
• 8th Place: 40 STEEM
• 9th Place: 36 STEEM
• 10th Place: 33 STEEM
• 11th Place: 30 STEEM
• 12th Place: 25 STEEM
• 13th Place: 23 STEEM
• 14th Place: 22 STEEM
• 15th Place: 20 STEEM
• 16th - 20th: 13 STEEM
• 21st - 25th: 11 STEEM
• 26th - 30th: 9 STEEM
• 31st - 40th: 7 STEEM
• 41st - 50th: 6 STEEM
• 51st - 150th: 2.5 STEEM Bonus

Deadline: 72 Hours

All articles must be submitted within 72 hours of this post to be considered!

Changes in submission rules below

WHAT IS XAYA – DECENTRALIZED REALITY

Xaya enables the development of rich and intricate virtual worlds hosted in a decentralized manner without the need for servers. Xaya will cut the time it takes games to get from concept to release, while reducing the financial burdens of infrastructure and administration on small development teams.

In these decentralized game universes, players will have real ownership of their online assets and share in the profit potential that the developers have built. This will be done with the ability to change their online assets into real-world value with the use of cryptocurrency via simple and safe trades and shares of their online goods.

XAYA is not simply an asset platform, it also allows for game worlds to run completely autonomous so that players will never lose their assets due to third party negligence. In contrast, there are many blockchain asset storage platforms in which the games are run in a centralized manner and the blockchain is used for the storage of assets, but this causes the issue in which the game servers could be shut down or the servers could crash making the assets completely useless and therefore worthless.

FIRST CONCEPT – HUNTERCOIN

In 2013 the Xaya team put to practice:

• The first decentralized massively multiplayer game [1]
• The first game world built on the blockchain [2]
• The first human mining permissible cryptocurrency [3]
• The first multi algo currency

The Huntercoin experiment was a great success, with over 35,000 character interacting simultaneously in the game. It was completely autonomous and did not require any servers, becoming a ‘hobby project’ with a market cap over 10 million USD.

This time around, the format for Huntercoin can be applied to whatever imaginative outlets the community behind Xaya will procure.

All of the next generation games on Xaya can have the advantages of:

• Being provably fair
• Being decentralized and autonomous environments
• True Item Ownership and fair acquisition
• 24/7 Up-time
• Play to Earn gaming Experience
• Fraud proof trading

From the CEO - Andrew Colosimo

XAYA is a custom blockchain based off of Namecoin, a project that we have voluntary lead for over 5 years (the first official altcoin of which Satoshi had a large input - most of his last comments were regarding it on bitcointalk).
A lot of the Xaya concept is based on our first project, Huntercoin. Huntercoin was an experiment designed only to last for 1 year but it's still going today. Released in Feb 2014.
In Huntercoin players create a "hunter" in the blockchain and every move is recorded. Every node calculates the positions and state of the game every block. Very similar to how smart contracts work on Ethereum but released before it existed.

Xaya works in a similar way but solves scaling issues using various innovative methods, in-particular something we call Game Channels. Game channels is a technology we came up with in 2015 and was peer reviewed and published in 2016 in ledger.

https://www.ledgerjournal.org/ojs/index.php/ledger/article/view/15/64

Basically it's a platform for people to build blockchain games on. but with almost unlimited complexity and without expensive gas prices.

XAYA - UPCOMING GAMES

Xaya has two major releases in the works. With a live mainnet already launched, Xaya is gearing up to populate their platform with games. Unlike many blockchain projects, Xaya is not a mere concept - but a reality.

Treat Fighters

Set to launch very soon!

Treat fighters is a game set in the world of Canedoom! Cook up your best treat fighters, and compete with others in battle. The game will run entirely on the blockchain. With nodes acting as servers, players can expect 100% uptime in this crafting type game genre.

Soccer Manager

Soccer Manager is a very popular soccer team managing game with millions of downloads and now expanding into China.

https://www.soccermanager.com/crypto/

Partnering with Xaya will allow soccer manager to offer provably fair gameplay and true ownership of in-game assets to the players. In-game assets include currency, players, stadiums and more!

Xaya partnering with soccer manager is going to mean immediate exposure to millions of players for Xaya while providing Soccer Manager with a platform to offer a fully blockchain gaming experience.

By joining in and playing Soccer Manager powered by the Xaya platform, players can come as close as possible to being a real soccer manager!

Xaya is on the bleeding edge of blockchain technology, having contributed so much to the space with Huntercoin. Their experience, along with their ability to form strong partnerships will change the entire way that people game and transact in-game assets.

After all, if you are one of the top managers in Soccer Manager, you should be able to experience the wealth gained from that effort!

CRYPTOCURRENCY

Cryptocurrencies derive their value from many users making many transactions (high velocity of money).

Xaya is a virtual assets trading platform, simply put, built on top of virtual universes on the blockchain. By democratizing game development, Xaya will create pressure for high performance of their currency, called Chi, simply through the demand of developers to have their games seen. If the games do well, even better performance can be expected from the currency.

PROBLEM DEFINITIONS: DEVELOPERS AND GAMERS

• Developer Problem: Time and cost from concept to market is huge
• Gamer Problem: There is a higher demand for richer and more complex games, and games were time is not wasted (time is money).

These two problems feed into each other. As more and more complex games are demanded, fewer and fewer projects make it to market because of the time and cost constraints on small development teams.

Scaling challenges exist with both cryptocurrencies, and with asset storage ledgers. These real-time asset storage ledgers are a necessity for the gamers, independent of their actual gameplay.

The ownership of the game assets is another challenging requirement, especially throughout multiple multipart virtual environments. Ensuring provably fair gameplay and asset trading (gaming and trading without the use of scripts and bots) is difficult and not addressed by any competing asset trading platforms. [5]

TECHNOLOGY

Scaling is an issue for cryptocurrencies and massive games alike.

Xaya has developed “Trustless Off-chain Scaling for games (Game Channels) and Ephemeral Timestamps” to overcome these limitations. [6]

KEY INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

The Xaya currency is a Proof-of-Work (PoW) currency that persist the most important game data and player accounts.
Further innovations that reinforce the power of Xaya’s IP are the following:

• Global Game States: Using blockchain consensus to prevent cheating, and allow provably fair and decentralised gameplay
• Atomic trading: Developed by members of the Xaya team through their work on Namecoin in 2013 – allows trustless trading of game items, game currencies, and whole game accounts for Chi, ensuring its demand
• Game Channels: An extension of payment channels in Bitcoin that can be applied to enable limitless and real time gaming on the blockchain
• Ephemeral timestamps: To deal with in-game disputes, transactions on the main blockchain will be made to resolve them with the use of Merkle hash commitments, amortized mining incentives, and fraud proofs – ensuring the cost of transaction fees is not detrimental to participants of the platform

TECHNICAL DETAILS

The ever-famous scaling issue of cryptocurrencies and especially blockchain games can be solved on the Xaya platform through game channels. Game channels record moves on private sidechains. Digital signatures and hash-chain structures make sure that moves cannot be fraudulent or taken back. When the players agree on the outcome of the game, the rewards will be distributed via 2-of-2 multi-signature transactions. If players disagree, data in the sidechain allows the honest player to prove their claim and receive their due.

Source: Xaya WhitePaper

The remaining issue with the first game channels format is the following: “If a dispute is raised but then resolved, the game continues as before. However, this process puts transactions onto the main blockchain, thus removing the scalability gains and costing (both) players transaction fees.” [8]

A player who wants to ruin the game can frequently start disputes and resolve them to irritate honest players.

The solution is ephemeral timestamps – with the following two properties

• Nodes can send data (D) to be timestamped (T) by the public network and blockchain – Merkle trees make this free per timestamp and miners are still incentivized to process these timestamps
• These timestamps can be used to prove to the network that another person could have known D during T – this can be used to prove that said gamer did not act in the game channel by that channel’s rules; paying out the honest player on the spot and covering the cost of latest timestamp

TYPES OF GAMES SUPPORTED

The following are a few of the games a developer can build or access on Xaya:

• Collectible card games
• Real-time strategy games (RTS)/ multiplayer online battle arenas (MOBA)
• Turn-based games
• MMORPGs
  There are other genres as game types beyond the three popular online categories mentioned.

XAYA - Main Sale Live

The XAYA main sale is currently live!

Xaya Main Sale

User can purchase tokens as well as register for an account to earn tokens by completing some basic tasks!

Xaya has an extremely active community and are happy to answer any user questions in their Xaya Telegram Group!

Dates:

The token sale is to run for 5 weeks starting on September 7th!

CONCLUSION

Xaya is about enabling concept-to-market actualization for developers, and fair play as well as simple asset ownership and real value conversion for players. The team is super-experienced with their involvement in Huntercoin and Namecoin; the use of ephemeral time stamps, merkle-structures, game channels and other technical properties of Xaya exemplify this. Finally game revenues have proven year-in and year-out that the Xaya team’s initiatives are not a waste of time and that the development of the Xaya platform is an economy waiting to emerge.

For more information watch this short video!