CoChilli Binary Options Launches on Manta Network Mainnet Using Virtual Rollups

CoChilli, a marquee binary options platform, launched on Manta Network mainnet using Virtual Rollups to provide an elite user experience with no gas fees and no latency. This is a watershed moment for Virtual Labs: the first mainnet use case of the Virtual Rollups in action.

As part of the mainnet launch, CoChilli and Virtual are teaming up to reward users for placing wagers by offering joint Virtual Points and CoChilli points. Here’s how to participate in the mainnet launch, and how to earn Virtual and CoChilli Points.

What are Virtual Rollups?

Virtual Rollups are powered by the Virtual Engine and offer a seamless UX, free from costly gas fees and pesky latency. They are effectively a temporary blockchain over which onchain games and dapps can be hosted. Here is how Virtual Rollups work: Imagine you are playing a traditional onchain game. Every transaction and/or interaction in the game that gets sent to the Ethereum network requires a transaction fee and consequently a wallet interaction and latency. Of course, blockchains like Ethereum work because users pay validators and are willing to wait 10-20 seconds for their transactions to be approved on chain. For dapps on Ethereum mainnet, this is an expensive and slow process. For dapps on an L2, this is slightly less expensive and slightly less slow, but there remains some cost and some latency. 

Ethereum and its L2s are great because validators are required to always be online and are slashed when they go offline or fail to approve transactions quickly enough. From the perspective of the community, this is wonderful because a transaction can be submitted to the network at any time and it will be approved. From the perspective of a dapp and it’s users, however, the fact that the Ethereum network is processing transactions all the time is irrelevant. Dapps and users care about having fast and cheap transactions when they are using the blockchain, not necessarily when someone else is.

Virtual rollups are temporary blockchains in which the users act as the validators, thereby eliminating latency and gas fees. In a multiplayer scenario, the player connects their wallet to the game, then they deposit however many tokens they want to play with into the session. At that point, a player-to-players network is formed between every players in the game. In the example of poker with 5 people and the dealer, the players at the table form a network between them and the dealer. They’ve just created a 6 node blockchain over which all the game data is communicated. Each player, including the dealer, acts simultaneously as a validator, keeping a ledger of the signatures and transactions in the game with which they can compare to the signatures each player used to initially deposit capital.

At the end of the game, the final state and associated ledger are sent to the underlying blockchain and officially settled onchain. This is how and why Virtual Rollups are EVM chain agnostic! We don’t depend on an L2; all we need is to be able to interact with existing smart contracts.

That was multiplayer, but CoChilli is single player. What changes?

The description of Virtual Rollups above was for multiplayer onchain games, such as poker, but the process is essentially the same for single player onchain dapps like CoChilli. When you start a session and start trading with CoChilli, you are creating a two node blockchain between yourself and CoChilli itself, and the user flow is exactly the same as what was described above. 

An erudite blockchain scholar might wonder about the security of Virtual Rollups, namely how the players reach consensus and if Virtual Rollups are subject to 51% attacks. To answer both questions at once, Virtual Rollups are actually much stricter with “consensus” than a traditional blockchain. Virtual Rollups are dynamic in the sense that players can come and go when they want, and signatures are required for every in-game action and actually determine the flow of the game. In order for a game to proceed on a Virtual Rollup, n-of-n signatures are required. That is, if only 1 player contests a transaction in the middle of a game, the game is halted and cannot proceed until all players agree. In the case of CoChilli, the user can contest a transaction at any time and halt the game from proceeding and settling onchain. This also prevents players from contesting old transactions or maliciously trying to change their version of the ledger since every other player also has a signed record of what has occurred.

For a more in-depth review of the security protocol inherent in Virtual Rollups, check out the result of our audit by renowned blockchain security firm Halborn! They completed our Tier 1 audit and validated the security of our infrastructure.

CoChilli launching on Manta mainnet fundamentally changes the landscape of fully decentralized and trustless games. Now, instead of having to constantly interact with one’s wallet and pay transaction fees while waiting, onchain games can offer a Web2 style experience while not sacrificing the values blockchain has to offer. The other testnet games that were launched using Virtual Rollups will similarly be launched on mainnet soon.

How to play CoChill on Manta mainnet and earn both Virtual Points and CoChilli Points?

CoChilli is live. Go play now at https://cochilli.io! Because this is on mainnet, bets are placed with genuine USDC. Unlike testnet, all winnings are real this time around.

Virtual Points are part of our ongoing incentivized testnet which will convert to tokens when we launch our TGE. Since CoChilli is the first game to use Virtual Rollups on mainnet, the Virtual Lab’s testnet is not over! This means that you can still play DedPrz CoinFlip, ZK Blackjack, and Ryze, all while earning Virtual Points.

For every bet placed on CoChilli, players will earn 25,000 Virtual Points and 10 CoChilli Points. This is now the predominant way to earn Virtual Points. You can also earn CoChilli Points by completing airdrop tasks, such as holding the CoChilli NFT and staking tokens. All CoChilli airdrop tasks can be found at this link. The Virtual Point amount earned will automatically update in your Virtual Wallet. As independent projects, we will both be having a TGE in which the points will convert to tokens! Earn double the rewards for playing and maximize your winnings! 

As usual, follow Virtual on Twitter and join our Discord for the most up to date information!