Steam has achievements. Xbox has Gamerscore. PlayStation has Trophies. But on-chain games? No standard way to track player accomplishments across games. We built PRC-1, an open standard that any EffectStream game can implement, plus a portal where players see all their achievements in one place.
Every blockchain interaction that requires a wallet signature creates friction. In a turn-based game, you might tolerate one pop-up per move. But in a real-time game, you need dozens of signatures per minute, and each pop-up breaks the flow completely. Auto-sign fixes this by delegating non-financial signing to a session key: your wallet approves once, then the app signs on your behalf for the rest of the session.
The best way to learn a framework is to see it in action. We've built five game templates, each one showing a different chain integration, cryptographic technique, or architectural pattern. They're all open-source, playable live, and ready to fork.
Cardano provides strong settlement guarantees, but all state is public. For applications that need private computation (secret ballots, hidden hands, confidential business logic), that's a real limitation. By integrating Midnight's ZK-native design with Cardano, EffectStream applications can have public settlement on Cardano with private state via Midnight's zero-knowledge proofs.
In Part 1 through Part 3 we built a stack that observes Cardano delegation — index the certificates, persist them, gate user inputs on pool membership. The application reads delegation; delegation does not read the application. There is a more ambitious place to put stake pools, though: at the consensus layer of a chain itself. That is where Midnight lives. Once you go there, "react to delegation" stops being a feature flag inside a game and starts being block production for an entire ecosystem of games.