IguVerse on Chainstack: Leading a new social paradigm in Web3

Petar Stoykov

March 13, 2023

Balancing the network load on BNB for seamless social gaming

Chainstack’s resolution to the network load issues we experienced was both swift and smooth. We saw greater performance uplift across our DApp infrastructure once the changes went live overall. We are quite happy with the outcome and haven’t faced the need to reopen the case ever since.
Mariusz Beltowski, Technical Director, IguVerse

IguVerse paves the way for socialize-to-earn on Web3

IguVerse is an online social-network type of game that allows multiple players to engage with gameplay mechanics through social networks or social media. In recent times, the play-to-earn business model has evolved into the concept of real-world action to earn, where players can perform activities in the real world and earn rewards. Move-to-earn gained popularity a year ago and ushered in a new era for play-to-earn games.

IguVerse has developed a new concept called “socialize-to-earn,” which leverages social media and pet lovers’ interests to provide rewards for simple daily tasks and social media activities. Social media is a crucial tool for disseminating information, and many projects have gained popularity by utilizing platforms like Facebook. Such projects have a high engagement rate and garner significant attention due to the platform’s popularity.

Figure 1: IguVerse promo video

Their concept’s most significant advantage is that players collaborate and interact on social media, organically promoting the project on the platform. This results in an exponential increase in the game’s popularity as each player posts about it, drawing their friends’ attention to the game. Because of this, an explosive initial momentum in both popularity and demand is a given.

Blockchain technology empowers users to own assets without permission. A sophisticated player-owned economy will encourage skilled players to reach advanced levels. Up until now, the DApp has generated over 800K mobile downloads from both app stores, 100K Daily Active Users (DAUs), and a whopping 4M+ worth of NFTs sold on the platform.

Figure 2: IguVerse DApp key stats; Source: IguVerse

Social gamification meets AI, Web3, and NFTs

Using AI/ML technologies, the IguVerse GameFi app reimagines the concept of NFTs. It establishes user-generated NFTs as a new standard, surpassing anonymous collections with NFT 2.0. IguVerse presents an innovative game mechanic, “socialize-to-earn,” alongside two additional concepts: “move-to-earn” and “play-to-earn.” Users may receive rewards by completing simple tasks such as sharing pet photos on social media or taking care of virtual pets by walking and feeding them.

Figure 3: IguVerse revenue model; Source: IguVerse

IguVerse’s pet-centric social-network game merges the three most popular game mechanics in the genre: “socialize-to-earn,” “move-to-earn,” and “play-to-earn” into a single app. The app revolutionizes the Web3 gaming industry by incorporating social and community elements into GameFi. This pioneering idea brings pet owners worldwide together in a single app and offers them cryptocurrency rewards by engaging in their everyday social media routine.

Figure 4: IguVerse dual token model; Source: IguVerse

A case of high network load on BNB

Like any social-network game, IguVerse generates an incredible amount of interactions. But while this is much less of a challenge with a Web2 approach, having such engagement and recording it on-chain is a completely different story. And being able to process them efficiently can be game-changing.

That is why, the IguVerse development team, above anything else, needed a swift response and resolution from our support team when the platform faced an overwhelming network load on BNB. Due to the sheer volume of interactions being logged on IguVerse, the amount of compute resources their nodes required to perform was growing at an exponential rate. This resulted in failed transactions and desync issues once hardware limits were reached.

Swiftly balancing the load with Chainstack

Once IguVerse reached out to inform us of the issue, our support engineers responded swiftly in taking up the case. Upon closer inspection, we discovered the root issue in the overwhelming amount of requests some power IguVerse users generated during playtime. Because of this, the need to tweak the load balancer setup and adapt it better to such edge cases became apparent.

So, to treat the issue at its root and permanently resolve further occurrences, Chainstack engineers worked to allocate additional hardware resources in augmenting the load balancer setup towards optimal performance. With the changes going live, IguVerse, saw a steady decrease in the compute resources being used for platform operations until settling down to levels within parameters.

Resolution summary

The IguVerse social network game generates a lot of interactions, during playtime which posed a challenge when logging these interactions on-chain.
This led to failed transactions and desync issues due to the overwhelming amount of compute resources needed to handle these interactions.
The IguVerse team contacted Chainstack for support and we identified the root cause as an excessive number of requests generated from some users on the platform.
Chainstack engineers allocated additional hardware resources to the load balancer setup and adapted it to better fit the edge cases to treat the issue at its root.
This resolved the issue and streamlined the compute resources needed for the effective platform operations of IguVerse.
IguVerse enjoys a smooth and steady infrastructure performance with no service interruptions or causes for distress ever since.
At the time of writing, IguVerse continues to deliver an outstanding Web3 experience to its users across the world.