🤖 AI Summary
This study addresses the “death spiral” in Web3 gaming driven by speculative bubbles, capital monopolization, and inflation. It argues that a sustainable open-game economy must satisfy three core conditions: resistance to Sybil attacks, resilience against capital dominance, and immunity to inflationary saturation. To this end, the authors propose the Identity-Bound Asset Integrity Model (IBAIM), which uniquely integrates privacy-preserving biometric identity verification with an asymmetric utility decay mechanism. Leveraging zero-knowledge biometric hashing, account abstraction, and zk-PoI (zero-knowledge Proof of Identity), IBAIM anchors asset utility to verifiable human identities, thereby decoupling speculation from genuine gameplay achievements. Furthermore, a thermodynamic entropy–inspired asset degradation mechanism disentangles speculative behavior from endogenous value creation. Empirical results demonstrate that moderately constraining asset liquidity significantly enhances long-term system stability, offering both theoretical grounding and a practical pathway toward sustainable GameFi ecosystems.
📝 Abstract
The rapid collapse of decentralized game economies, often characterized by the \textit{death spiral,} remains the most formidable barrier to the mass adoption of Web3 gaming. This paper proposes that the sustainability of an open game economy is predicated on three necessary and sufficient conditions: Anti-Sybil Resilience, Anti-Capital Dominance, and Anti-Inflationary Saturation. The first section establishes a theoretical proof of these conditions, arguing that the absence of any single dimension leads to systemic failure. The second section explores the dialectical relationship between these dimensions, illustrating how unchecked automation and capital-driven monopolies accelerate asset hyperinflation. In the third section, we introduce the Identity-Bound Asset Integrity Model (IBAIM) as a comprehensive technical solution. IBAIM utilizes Zero-Knowledge (ZK) biometric hashing and Account Abstraction (AA) to anchor asset utility to unique human identities through a privacy-preserving and regulatory-compliant architecture. By exogenizing biometric verification to trusted local environments and utilizing Zero-Knowledge Proofs of Identity (zk-PoI), the model ensures absolute user privacy. Furthermore, by implementing an Asymmetric Utility Decay (AUD) engine-whereby assets suffer a vertical 50% utility cliff upon secondary transfer-and an entropy-driven thermodynamic degradation mechanism., the model successfully decouples financial speculation from in-game merit. Finally, we apply this framework to analyze prominent historical failures in the GameFi sector, demonstrating that their collapse was an inevitable consequence of violating these core economic constraints. Our findings suggest that trading a degree of asset liquidity for system integrity is the only viable path toward long-term economic viability in decentralized virtual worlds.