Capture The Gap ⛽🎮

↘️ Start here

Introduction

Welcome to Capture the Gap documentation.

Here you’ll find everything you need to understand the game, play effectively, and optimize your strategy.

Capture the Gap is not just a game - it’s a live experiment in decentralized infrastructure.

By playing, you earn points that will eventually convert into ownership, while directly supporting the network’s infrastructure.

Through gameplay, you’ll also explore why gas matters - not just as a fee, but as a critical signal that powers coordination across all blockchains.

Let’s Dive in!

Resources

• TL;DR on Gas Network ⛽ (blocknative.com)
• Exploring the Gas Network Community Dashboard (blocknative.com)
• Optimizing Uniswap V4 Swap Fees With Gas Network (blocknative.com)
• How overspending on gas throttles demand—and what accurate fee oracles unlock. (blocknative.com)
• RIGID: Enabling a Composable, Gas-aware, Interoperable Ecosystem (blocknative.com)

➡️ Capture the Gap is deployed on several chains, you can find the smart contract addresses here .

Purpose of the Game

Capture the Gap is a game where you track differences between onchain gas prices and real-time data from the Gas Network. By submitting timely updates to correct these discrepancies, you help maintain accurate oracle prices onchain. The larger the gap you close, the more points you earn. Those points contribute to your future stake in the network’s decentralized ownership.

Capture the Gap is a strategy game that solves a real infrastructure problem.

The Gas Network Oracle needs to stay in sync with live gas prices across chains. When it drifts, downstream apps suffer - from bad fee estimates to delayed transactions. But keeping it aligned 24/7 is hard.

That’s where players come in. You monitor the gap between the oracle’s current value and the latest gas data. When it’s off, you submit an update. The bigger the gap you close, the more points you earn.

This isn’t just for fun. Every update helps maintain a core system that other apps rely on. And the points you earn may one day convert into a stake in the Gas Network itself.

Game Rules

The fundamental objective is to update the gas price oracle at the most opportune moment to maximize your rewards. This involves understanding the Gap and the dynamics of multiplayer interaction.

The game will run for a period of 3 months. At the end, an onchain snapshot of all the wallet addresses of players will be used as the source of truth in the upcoming network ownership distribution process. A bonus might be applied depending on a player engagement to boost their total rewards’ impact.

Understanding the Gap

The Gap is the core mechanic determining your potential reward. It represents the difference between the current gas price on the chain and the true, real-time gas price, as well as the time elapsed between the current time and the last oracle update.

• How the Gap is Calculated: The Gap is a dynamic measure influenced by time and volatility.
  • Time Reward: As time passes since the last oracle update, the potential reward (and thus the Gap) grows. This encourages players to update the oracle when it becomes stale.
  • Volatility Impact: The Gap will grow even more if there's a significant difference between the current gas price on the chain and the last updated gas price, which happens more often during periods of high gas price volatility. This incentivizes timely updates during fluctuating market conditions.
• Impact of Multiplayer Interaction:
  • Resetting the Gap: When a player or any oracle user - to understand the distinction read here - updates the oracle via the UI or directly onchain, the Gap and its associated rewards go back to 0.
  • Steadily Growing Back: After a reset, the reward potential immediately begins to grow back over time, slow at first, then more rapidly. This provides a window for new opportunities to emerge. To learn more about the mathematics behind the Gap, refer to the Reward Formula section.
  • Strategic Waiting: Waiting can be a viable strategy to let the reward build up. However, if other players are also waiting to update, the opportunity might disappear as soon as one of them acts.
  • Regular Updates vs. Big Updates: Sometimes, performing regular, smaller updates is the best strategy to secure consistent rewards. At other times, waiting for a significant build-up of the Gap can yield a larger reward.

Be strategic and observe the market.

Oracle Fee: An Anti-Spamming Mechanism

A small oracle fee is associated with updating the gas price. This fee serves as an anti-spamming mechanism, discouraging malicious or unnecessary oracle updates that could prevent other players from participating and ensuring the integrity of the network.

The Oracle fee across all chains is currently set at 4000 gwei - around $0.01 at time of writing.

↘️ Game Interface

Understanding the User Interface

➡️ Capture the Gap - game.gas.network

The game’s UI is designed to provide all the information players need to easily identify and capture gaps, while maximizing their points!

Below is a top down breakdown.

Navigation Bar

• How it works: click this to open the Welcome Modal which contains information about the purpose of the game and how to play.
• View Docs: this brings you here - the documentation site of Capture The Gap.

Nodes graph

The game's UI features a visual graph to help players understand in real-time how Gaps are emerging and evolving.

Each floating node is a dynamic representation of the gaps available on the oracle chain you have currently selected in the view.

In this example, we are viewing gaps on Ethereum Sepolia.

A gap is associated with the gas price recorded on the oracle chain.

In this example, the biggest gap on Ethereum Sepolia is Ethereum gas Price. You can hover to see more details.

Upon hover, you can see more details about the gap’s components:

• Time Reward: potential points reward based on the time elapsed since the last time this gas price was updated on the selected oracle chain.
• Gas Diff. Reward: potential points associated to the gas price difference observed between the real-time Gas Network gas price and the one available on the selected oracle chain.
• Total reward: the sum of both.

The bigger the Gap, the more stale and obsolete the gas price for this chain is on the Oracle and the more urgency there is to push an update. Bigger gaps earn higher rewards.

Sharp fluctuations in the real-time Gas Prices should be monitored as they indicate high volatility. During these periods, the gaps can move more rapidly, creating larger opportunities for rewards. Those real-time Gas Prices are available offchain to all on the Gas Network API .

ℹ️ Note: you can drag and drop the gaps or gently observe them as they move around and evolve based on offchain vs. onchain realities.

User Profile

This is where the main information about your player's profile is displayed.

Tiers

The Gas Network Game features a tiered system that recognizes and rewards consistent performance. Your performance is tracked through points which determine your tier and placement on the Leaderboard .

Higher tiers unlock greater prestige and potentially exclusive bonuses.

Here is a list of currently supported tiers and their corresponding points requirements:

'0': 'wei',
'1000': 'babbage',
'10,000': 'lovelace',
'100,000': 'shannon',
'1,000,000': 'szabo',
'10,000,000': 'finney',
'25,000,000': 'lamarr',
'50,000,000': 'hamilton',
'100,000,000': 'buterin',
'200,000,000': 'merkle',
'500,000,000': 'turing'

Gas Network Oracle

This is where you effectively interact with the smart contract to push an oracle update while earning points.

At the heart of Capture the Gap is the oracle's function of bringing gas price data from one blockchain to another. This is represented by the Gas Network Oracle module shown below.

This makes it possible from a UI to bridge GasNet chain - which hosts the gas prices for more than 40 chains - and an Oracle chain where users (smart contracts, agents, protocols, dapps, solvers) are consuming the data.

• ‘Gas Prices For’

  The gas price data originates from the GasNet chain, where multiple agents continuously estimate gas prices for various blockchains. These agents compete in a multi-agent system which evaluates and selects the best data. This real-time data represents current gas prices and on active chain those may fluctuate frequently. Your role is to bridge this data from GasNet to other chains to make users and smart-contract ‘gas-aware’.

  ℹ️ Note: For the purpose of the game, only 6 Gas Prices are supported, but Gas Network provides estimates for more than 40 chains.

• ‘Oracle Chain’

  The game runs on these target blockchains - for example Ethereum, Base, Linea, Unichain, etc. When you push an update, you earn points and you provide to the Oracle contract the updated gas prices fetched from GasNet. Decentralized applications on these chains rely on this information for accurate fee calculations.

• Your Role

  You act as a bridge, securely and efficiently transferring critical gas price data from the GasNet chain to various Oracle Chains, and earn points doing it.

How to Update and Earn points?

Steps and video below

1. Make sure your wallet is connected on the interface.
2. Select in Gas Prices For which gas prices you want to update. By default, you will update all which earns you more points.
3. Select on which Oracle Chain you want to push the update. This is the chain on which your transaction will be executed.
4. Click Update Oracle to Earn.
5. Confirm the transaction in your wallet.
6. If your update has been successful, the modal will show you
   1. Total points earned
   2. Share on X option
   3. A detailed breakdown of all the gaps you closed

Watch the Update Flow Video

ℹ️ Note: its advised by default to select all chains in the Gas Prices dropdown when publishing estimates on the Oracle chain to maximize points earned per gas spent.

Global Leaderboard

The leaderboard showcases the top-performing players in the Gas Network Game. It tracks total points earned onchain per address / ENS to provide a comprehensive overview of player skill and contribution. The leaderboard updates after each player oracle submission.

Fields

• Rank: Player position, sorted by points (descending order).
• Player: ENS name if available, otherwise a shortened address.
• Points: Total score (e.g. 2,132,705 pts).
• Tier: Player tier, shown as colored pill (click here to learn more about available tiers)
• Footer:
  • Last updated: Time since last leaderboard data refresh (e.g. 17 seconds ago).
  • Total Players: Count of all game participants (e.g. 21).

↘️ Advanced concepts

This pages contains useful information for optimizers and strategic players.

Reward Formula

This section details the mathematical underpinnings of the reward system for players seeking to optimize their strategies or simply understand how Capture the Gap works.

General Principle

The Reward is proportional to the gas difference and the time elapsed since the last update, with an additional multiplier optimized for each chain's specific update behavior. It resets to zero whenever an update is submitted to the Oracle.

Each chain has a uniquely tuned multiplier based on the desired typical update frequency.

Detailed Formula

F,G and H are functions that produce reward values based on a given input, and they also bound the range of those rewards. The min rewards is 0 and the max rewards is 5000.

• Gas Reward = F((New Prediction - Old Prediction)/Avg. Chain Deviation)
  • Avg Chain Deviation = Standard Deviation of Onchain Min Values over the last 30 days
• Time Reward = G(CurrentTime - LastUpdateTime)
• Gap Reward = (Time Reward + Gas Reward) * Multiplier
  • Multiplier = H(EMA(Time Between Updates since Oracle Launch))
  • EMA = Exponential Moving Average
• The max multiplier is 10.
• The Reward has a defined lower bound of 0.01 points and an upper bound of 100,000 points.
• Rewards scale with quadratic growth, meaning they accelerate as the Gap increases.

In simple terms: the longer a player waits - or the bigger the difference becomes - the faster their rewards start to climb.

What this means for players

• Actively monitoring the components of the Gap (gas diff and time elapsed since last update) is key to identifying prime opportunities for reward acceleration.
• Frequent spamming of a chain will make the Multiplier decrease and result in reduced reward points. This is designed to discourage farming points on lower-cost chains.
• While higher rewards come as gap increases, they also introduce greater competition from other players seeking the same opportunities.
• Early gains may seem modest, but patience and risk-taking are rewarded. Strategic timing can lead to significantly higher payoffs later on.

Considerations for Optimizers

• Gas Fees: Factor in the cost of gas for your update transactions. You may want to conceptually weigh these costs against the points earned to understand the true value of your updates.
• Competition: The presence of other players means opportunities can be fleeting.
• Market Monitoring: Tools or scripts to monitor real-time gas prices and onchain oracle updates can give you an edge.
• Slippage: The gas price might change slightly between when you calculate the optimal update and when your transaction is processed.

Interacting with the Oracle and Earning Rewards

There are multiple ways to interact with the Gas Network Oracle, each with different implications for earning rewards:

• Direct Onchain Update of the Oracle (No Rewards ❌): Anyone can update the oracle directly onchain by interacting with the smart contracts without going through the Capture the Gap game's smart contract or the UI. Updates performed this way will not earn any rewards. This is primarily for external applications or advanced users who need to update the oracle for their own purposes.
• Game Smart Contract Interaction (Rewards Earned ✅): Anyone can interact directly with the game's smart contract to update the oracle without using the UI. Updates performed this way will earn rewards if a Gap is successfully captured. This method is for advanced users and developers who prefer programmatic interaction to play.
• Gas Network Game UI (Rewards Earned ✅): The most user-friendly way to participate is by using the official Gas Network Game UI at game.gas.network . Updates performed through the UI will earn rewards if a Gap is successfully captured, and the UI provides a more user-friendly interface for understanding game dynamics.

Game Smart Contracts

The game is deployed on several chains, all smart contract addresses can be found here .

These Game smart contracts are different from the Oracle Smart Contracts which can be found here