Hyperledger blockchain pinball game simulates high-frequency asset trading

Last week, a group of dozens of global financial institutions and blockchain startups played a friendly game of pinball online.

Of course, this is no ordinary game of virtual marbles; these marbles were created using an early version of the Fabric blockchain platform, part of the Hyperledger project.

It is reported that the participants in this game include London Stock Exchange Group, IBM, Skuchain, Everledger and Loyyal, in addition to some other companies that refused to disclose their identities.

Once the digital assets were distributed, participants were able to use the Fabric platform to move the marbles from one account to another through a drag-and-drop process, which one participant jokingly called the blockchain version of a “hot potato.”

This is a milestone for the Hyperledger project, the next step in the business blockchain consortium’s plan to create a practical distributed ledger platform that can handle different types of assets and any number of them.

“These nodes are all over the world, right?” one of the participants asked early in the demonstration.

“Yes,” replied Gari Singh, a senior engineer at IBM and chief technology officer of its blockchain division.

John Wolpert, IBM’s global blockchain lead, commented:

“This is one small step for Pinball, one giant leap for Hyperledger.”

Pinball game

The "marble app" test was conducted at 10 a.m. ET on Friday and marks a major milestone for the Hyperledger project, which marks exactly one year since the commercial blockchain project was launched.

Initially, the Fabric platform’s code was contributed by IBM and Digital Asset Holdings (DAH), but its code base has changed significantly over the past year, with more than 100 developers from the Hyperledger ecosystem continuing to contribute to the project.

Unlike the open Bitcoin network, which any participant can access or participate in, Hyperledger’s Fabric is a closed system, meaning that only qualified participants can use it to construct transactions.

To join the blockchain pinball game, participants need to create an account via email. Once created, a private key, equivalent to a membership card, will be sent to each recipient's email address, and then participants can download the necessary software.

“That’s pretty cool,” one participant said after a script was executed and a series of virtual marble containers appeared. “Very cool,” another voice echoed.

After the user logs in, the rules of the game are very simple.

Participants can create and trade assets between each other. However, they cannot trade assets owned by anyone else.

And what follows is a virtual war asset game.

Companies can then begin playing this digital game of hot potato before being alerted to attempting an “illegal action” (which would be prevented by the terms of the smart contract). A “show mode” is also available, which displays the transaction structure in a real-time animation.

During the game, team members randomly moved marbles from their own accounts to other people's accounts. This led to the next (and perhaps most critical) stage of testing.

“Let’s try to break it,” one of the participants mentioned.

My heart is in my throat

A melee ensued, and that’s exactly what they were doing.

A yellow marble was successfully transferred from one account to an account controlled by Alasdair Blackwell, chief technology officer of blockchain startup Everledger, but it was not successfully displayed.

Soon, complaints began to emerge.

Every other participant saw the little yellow circle appear in Everledger’s bag of digital marbles, but Blackwell’s own account failed to show the asset. If the marble had represented a share of stock in a company or a diamond fresh from Catoca, Angola, it would have been lost forever.

“My heart was in my throat,” Blackwell later told reporters.

One of the participants described it as a rocket blowing up one of the SpaceX landing pads. Participants hoped that this was part of the learning curve for Hyperledger and that Blackwell had no choice but to reboot his computer.

Blackwell's marbles did appear for the other participants, but it is not known what went wrong. After the demonstration, IBM's Wolpert commented:

“In reality, it failed.”

Blackwell was more positive, saying:

“This is a win for the engineering team, people from all over the world coming together and working together,” he told CoinDesk. “There were some temporary hiccups, but that was expected.”

Looking ahead

After the virtual marbles game is over, Hyperledger members will spend the next few weeks analyzing the results of the test.

In an interview with Coindesk, Jerry Cuomo, vice president of blockchain technology at IBM, compared the test to the early days of the internet.

After the demonstration, Cuomo said he believed the simple demonstration showed the technology had the potential to be applied to a wide range of assets.

Ultimately, he added, the purpose of this test is to allow stakeholders to actually operate the technology.

Cuomo concluded:

“The first version of the fabric code is progressing very smoothly, and we want to test digital asset transactions on the spot in a special way.”