EIP-6551: The Token Bound Account No One's Paying Attention To Yet

Integrating blockchain into games is harder than one might think. It's difficult to determine what it means to use blockchain in a single game. People who know blockchain often don't know much about games, and vice versa. As someone who is not well-versed in either, I'm gradually learning about both. Recently, I've come to believe that Token Bound Accounts (TBAs) are excellent for use in blockchain games or traditional games.

Many still don't recognize blockchain, but it emerged to solve centralized issues easily. The DeFi market, trading tokens anonymously without centralized platforms, is truly remarkable. It's not yet mainstream, but such transactions will continue to grow and attract more users.

The game market also has such centralized spaces, platforms that sell in-game currency or IDs. Platforms like IDFarm, ItemBay act as centralized exchanges for P2P transactions and take fees. The revenues from these transactions do not go to game companies but to third-party platforms. If these platforms weren't used and users traded items or accounts directly via P2P, allowing game companies to take the transaction fees, wouldn't it be a more efficient and convenient model?

Token Bound Accounts (TBAs), known as TBAs, seem to be a good technology to know, as they can solve the above problems. TBAs are a technology that links NFTs and blockchain accounts. The accounts referred to here are blockchain accounts that an NFT holder can control. There are typical blockchain accounts used, like MetaMask, and if you have an NFT in that account, you can control another account linked to the NFT.

Typical blockchain accounts might include MetaMask, but these accounts are not easy for a buyer to purchase if you play a game and sell that account. Because the account has been exposed to the private key, it can be hacked at any time, and it's not easy to transfer all assets to another account. However, if you use a TBA, even if you transfer a single NFT, the account within it and all the tokens and NFTs owned by the account will follow, making it very easy to trade accounts, characters, or items.

If the NFT represents a game account, characters used in the account can be made into blockchain accounts, and items can be stored as NFTs in each account. If the NFT is an item, other items bound to the item can be placed in the connected account as NFTs. Since it also supports multiple EVM chains, the account NFT can be created on the Ethereum network, and item NFTs bound to the connected account can use an L2 chain that is cheap or free of gas fees.

This technology is fully usable now, but to see it used in practice, a game-specific NFT platform will be needed. OpenSea and Blur don't seem to fit this model, and there needs to be an NFT marketplace for EIP-6551 that can trade game-specific accounts. If this actually becomes a good business model for game companies, services that help account NFTs may also come out. Of course, it will also be necessary to develop security to help create accounts with a Google account instead of MetaMask and to recover accounts safely.

While researching EIP-6551, I've seen or run most of the projects, and the most interesting was Pinata's Cosmic Cowboys project. This also added EIP-6551 to the game, but it was added to NPCs in the game. Using EIP-6551 to connect accounts to NPCs that do meaningless tasks or quests in the game, NPCs were also allowed to have assets, and AI was attached to allow NPCs to make their own decisions on buying and selling assets. The decision made by the NPC was saved on the blockchain by running a blockchain function, and the NPC's metadata was stored through IPFS. And users can talk to each NPC, which used XMTP. XMTP is a protocol that allows blockchain accounts to send messages to each other, which is possible because NPCs have accounts.

I'm not sure what it means for NPCs to have accounts yet. However, seeing such attempts in various places, I can see that they are trying to break down the boundary between NPC and PC, and the scope of using EIP-6551 may be larger than I thought. Although I can't find a good example, it might be better used outside the game. Anyway, the creation of exchangeable blockchain accounts in this market seems to be an important reason why Token Bound Accounts are important.

Image source: Generated through OpenAI's DALL·E