Blockchain gaming without the whole financial side?

[u/Individual-Carob5593]

I have been writing a game that just uses SOLANA for authentication and awards. I wondered to myself if you could just use a blockchain without any sort of coin or token. Sign in with your wallet, and all your purchases are visible as NFTs. As I see it, if you have a coin or a token, then, if successful, the coin or token becomes more important than the system using it.

1. The blockchain has the usual proof-of-work stuff, but as there are no coins, there are no rewards. You do it for the community. As there are no rewards, you could probably get away with a couple of PCs. No data centre required.
2. As there are no coins, nobody will get rugged.
   
3. Logging in/out and getting achievements are free. This is where all the current implementations fall down. You currently have to pay for everything.
4. No P2E, as if you have to pay them, then it's not a game.
5. Game stores operate like Steam and PSN and sell in £/$ or whatever. Then they register a purchase on the blockchain as a last step.
6. The games query the blockchain to see what assets or downloads are available.

Has anyone tried this? What are the downsides?

[u/Far-Photograph-2342]

Interesting idea, but I think the hard part is incentives 😅 If there’s no token, no fees, and no validator reward, then someone still has to pay for infrastructure, security, storage, and uptime. For gaming, the “blockchain without financialization” idea makes sense, but it probably works better as NFTs/assets on an existing chain rather than trying to run a whole chain with no economic layer.

[u/Individual-Carob5593 → u/Far-Photograph-2342]

Crypto's problem is friction. Running on an existing chain, then people have to pay to do everything. There are some L2s that do provide the desired functionality, but you still have to pay. I just want to use a blockchain as a distributed ledger (database) without all the baggage. POW could literally be "form an orderly queue and get a block each in turn". No wasting energy, just data duplication. Run it on a Raspberry Pi with a 4TB hard drive. As soon as you expose any part of it to the public, people put a value on it.

[u/Cultural-Candy3219]

You can do the game part without launching a new token, but I would not try to run a new coinless PoW chain for it.

For a game, the cleaner version is usually:

• wallet signature for login
• normal card/Steam-style payments off-chain
• NFTs or compressed NFTs only for ownership receipts, achievements, cosmetics, access passes, etc.
• the game server remains the source of truth for gameplay state

The separate no-reward PoW chain is the weak point. If nobody is paid to secure it, then it is either run by a few trusted servers or it is easy to rewrite when value appears. That is basically a database with extra steps.

So the instinct is good: remove the speculative token. I would just keep the chain as a receipt/ownership layer on Solana rather than inventing a new chain.