How Decentral built the leading metaverse game with Alchemy and Polygon

The customer-obsessed Decentral Games (DG) team has pioneered the metaverse with their marquee game, ICE Poker, built and scaled on Alchemy and Polygon.

After navigating instability issues with various RPC providers, DG, a web3 gaming ecosystem, realized that in order to achieve their desired scale, they needed an infrastructure partner that could provide consistent reliability and 100% accurate blockchain data. DG turned to Alchemy, and since doing so, has reached unprecedented heights, today with a $37M market cap.

A metaverse-based play-to-earn game

ICE Poker is a free metaverse poker game where players earn rewards by completing daily challenges and competing against each other on a leaderboard. Skilled players are rewarded with $ICE tokens, the in-game currency that enables NFT upgrades and access to new tournament modes. 

$DG is their separate utility token, used to activate and upgrade ICE wearables. When staked, it can be used to vote on governance proposals and grant access to premium guild tools.

Alchemy’s uninterrupted reliability drove DG’s growth

Initially, DG launched ICE Poker on various alternative private and public web3 infrastructure providers. However, as their usage scaled, they were running into multiple outages per week, requiring them to switch providers, and amounting to a ton of manual work. 

Without question, Alchemy has been the only provider with a comprehensive set of tools that enables us to scale seamlessly, with uninterrupted reliability, while making thousands of calls each day.

With products like Alchemy’s Supernode, DG accesses the most reliable and scalable infrastructure in web3. Supernode features 99.99% up-time, ensuring that ICE Poker is up and and running 24/7, the way a globally-accessed metaverse needs to be. 

As the infrastructure provider connecting DG to Polygon, Alchemy serves millions of NFTs and various smart contracts daily.

Alchemy’s scalability and throughput ensures DG drops dominate the web3 market

As DG’s metaverse has taken off, Alchemy’s infrastructure has scaled to meet their needs, with 0% rate limiting.

At the start of 2022, DG was running ICE Wearable mints every few weeks. Each drop included over 1,200 NFTs and demand was more than double supply. The drops would sell out in less than a minute, with one drop generating more than $6M ETH that went towards the DG Treasury. 

Driving such meaningful business metrics required DG’s backend infrastructure, handled by Alchemy, to scale with a massive amount of calls, in a very short timespan. 

Not only did Alchemy ensure there would be 0% rate limiting for each drop, but their infrastructure handled the load seamlessly, and the team was on call for each one, monitoring from the sidelines to ensure there were no bottlenecks.

The benefits translate to DG’s users: DG users are able to mint what they want and enjoy a stable experience while playing in DG venues. Now that service outages and blockchain call delays are no longer an issue, DG can focus less attention on maintenance and more on developing products that create the best possible metaverse gaming experience. 

Building on Polygon, the Ethereum scaling solution

ICE Poker enables thousands of daily games, all happening simultaneously on-chain. This level of traffic has the potential for exorbitant costs, both in development and for DG’s users. The DG team recognized this could create a negative user experience.

To circumvent this risk, DG built their game on Polygon, an Ethereum Layer 2 scaling solution. 

Alchemy’s support for Polygon made it an easy choice for us that compounded benefits. We got to couple the benefits of Polygon’s low fees and fast transaction times with Alchemy’s unmatched reliability. The best part is we’re able to pass all of these benefits back to our users.

Polygon's low network fees and rapid transactions have lowered the barrier to entry for ICE Poker’s users into the larger web3 ecosystem. In turn, like their choice to partner with Alchemy, this enables higher user retention. 

As DG continues to scale in both Daily Active Users (DAUs) and gameplay services, affordable scalability is even more important. With access to robust and scalable infrastructure, the DG team can primarily focus on building fun experiences rather than ways to mitigate the pains of a slower/more expensive network.

With Alchemy handling their infrastructure and Polygon’s blockchain providing low fees and high speed, ICE Poker will continue to dominate the metaverse ecosystem.

Here is how you can get started building with Alchemy on Polygon today.‍

FAQ

What is Decentral Games?

Decentral Games is a web3 gaming ecosystem company that builds metaverse gaming experiences, such as ICE Poker. Built inside Decentraland, ICE Poker accounts for over 60% of Decentraland traffic, where users can interact and play games against other users from all over the world.

What is Polygon?

Polygon is an Ethereum scaling solution that helps solve the high transaction costs and low-speed issues of Ethereum. Learn more about how Polygon achieved scale and increased product adoption by partnering with Alchemy.

What is an NFT?

A non-fungible-token, also known as an NFT, is a digital asset on the blockchain that cannot be duplicated. This means that an NFT cannot be replicated or mass-produced by another individual on the blockchain, making no two NFTs the same. NFTs allow creators to tokenize and sell their digital art, games, music, and other collectibles on the blockchain in a safe and secure way.