Team: WakeUp Labs
Preferred Contacts: Email: aztec@wakeuplabs.io | Twitter: x.com/wakeuplabs | Github: * github.com/wakeuplabs-io
Summary
Our project aims to port Dark Forest v0.6 to the Aztec Network, converting the original Circom circuits and Solidity contracts into Noir-based Aztec smart contracts. The result will be a fully functional, end-to-end implementation that showcases Aztec’s privacy capabilities. Alongside the technical work, we will produce adoption-focused resources, including an open-source repository with clear documentation, technical blog posts, and practical demonstrations.
Dark Forest pioneered privacy-preserving on-chain gaming in 2022 by leveraging ZK-SNARKs to create an information-asymmetric MMORPG. Despite its innovation and popularity, the original implementation never reached Ethereum mainnet due to high proof verification costs and the complexity of 2022-era tooling.
Aztec was built specifically to make applications like Dark Forest practical and scalable. Its composable privacy model allows direct validation of game logic inside private functions, eliminating the complex pre-hashing schemes required on Ethereum. This results in reduced code complexity, improved maintainability, and a more intuitive development model, while preserving the core information asymmetry that defines Dark Forest.
Rather than a risky ground-up rewrite, our approach focuses on a faithful port of the proven v0.6 codebase. We will convert existing circuits and contracts to Noir while preserving all core mechanics, including planet discovery with Perlin noise validation, energy and silver resource management, ship movement, artifact creation at foundries, and spacetime rip mechanics for NFT minting.
Beyond the port itself, we will prioritize player experience and ecosystem adoption. This includes a well-documented open-source repository, robust testing and CI/CD pipelines, video demonstrations, and a performant web client with plugin extensibility. Our goal is to deliver Aztec’s flagship privacy-preserving game for its alpha launch, while establishing clear patterns for future private games.
Our team has over five years of experience in blockchain gaming and zero-knowledge development, with a 13+ engineer team working across Ethereum scaling and ZK systems including Aztec, Starknet, and Arbitrum. We have built Noir-based games, are actively developing privacy-preserving applications on Aztec, and operate Aztec infrastructure as a Sequencer Provider. Leveraging this expertise, we will deliver Dark Forest on Aztec by March 22, 2026, as a polished, open-source flagship dApp.
Start and End Date
- Start Date: ASAP (January 2026). Immediately upon grant approval
- End Date: March 22, 2026. Functional MVP delivered (aligned with Aztec alpha launch)
About Us: Team Background and Experience
WakeUp Labs is a software Engineering studio focused on decentralized technology, zk tooling, and blockchain. We specialize in building advanced solutions for EVM-compatible chains and ZK rollups. Since 2022, we have delivered projects ranging from DeFi and real-world asset tokenization to zk-based games and cross-chain private infrastructure.
Our contributions to Aztec include:
- Operating as an official Sequencer Provider for Aztec, maintaining live infrastructure for validators and stakers.
- Building a Solution for Private Prediction Markets using Aztec + Arbitrum, enabling secure market resolution, private deposits and claims, and demonstrating advanced use cases for privacy-preserving cross-chain patterns.
- Developing Noir-based zk games such as ZK Battleship, using UltraHonk proving systems and Stylus compatibility.
- Actively contributing open-source tooling for Noir and cross-chain privacy infrastructure.
We have successfully completed projects with Optimism, Arbitrum, Starknet, Alpen and Aztec, with a team including:
- 1 Project Manager (coordination, delivery)
- 1 Technical Lead (blockchain/Noir dev)
- 2–3 Senior Engineers (zk contracts, proof optimization, frontend)
- 1 UX/QA Specialist (testing, feedback, UX refinement)
Technical Approach
Our implementation will be split into 5 phases throughout 8 weeks:
- Legacy Frontend Issues
- Contract Foundation & Circuit Conversion
- Frontend integration
- Deployment, testing & performance improvements
- Demonstration, Documentation, Blog entries, etc
Once we’ve a live and functional version for March 22 or if we get that working before we’ll follow up with these stretch milestones:
- Plugin development and developer guides
- Logs indexer service
- Further optimizations
Milestone 1: Legacy Frontend Issues
The current v0.6 frontend faces several legacy issues that prevent immediate development. Specifically, it relies on a centralized image server with a defunct backend API, which breaks planet and biome rendering. Additionally, several key dependencies are no longer available for installation, halting further development. The tech stack utilizes severely outdated libraries (such as Node.js v16 and ethers v5), leading to version incompatibilities and security risks.
Our approach will resolve these blockers by rebuilding asset delivery using decentralized or static solutions, modernizing the dependency tree, and ensuring long-term maintainability.
Milestone 2: Contract Foundation & Circuit Conversion
We begin by using the Noir implementations of the Biomebase and Perlin noise circuits that validate planet discovery claims, relying on the reference repository at SleepingShell/darkforest-noir as a valuable source of information. This reference mitigates uncertainty around circuit correctness and cryptographic guarantees while allowing us to focus development effort on integrating these circuits into Aztec’s private and public smart contract model.
We’ll implement the core contract structure using Aztec’s private/public function model: private notes for player-specific data (coordinates, exploration paths, private maps) and public storage for minimal on-chain state (planet ownership, hashed positions, global parameters). The architecture deliberately separates claim validation (private) from state updates (public), leveraging Aztec’s native privacy rather than manual hashing schemes. We’ll establish comprehensive unit tests and a CI pipeline.
We will also implement all core Dark Forest gameplay mechanics in Aztec smart contracts. This includes resource management, ship movement, planet capture, and artifact systems. We’ll implement energy and silver tracking with nullifier-based validation to prevent double-spending, ship movement with distance calculations and energy consumption, planet capture mechanics with ownership transfers, and operations for artifact creation.
Simultaneously, we will implement the spacetime rip mechanics that enable artifact-specific NFT minting. This showcases Aztec’s composable privacy by demonstrating how private game assets can become public NFTs while maintaining player privacy throughout gameplay. All mechanics will be validated against the v0.6 specification with comprehensive integration tests covering multi-player scenarios and edge cases.
Milestone 3: Frontend Integration
Given the constrained timeline and the well-organized nature of Dark Forest v0.6, starting from scratch would be counterproductive. Instead we aim to leverage the existing codebase by replacing only the modules that interact with the proof system, contracts, and wallets, among them: ContractsAPI, GameManager, AdminControl, SnarkProverQueue, SnarkArgsHelper, etc. The client will feature transaction batching and proof parallelization to achieve sub-60-second turn execution, background PoW mining for map exploration without interrupting gameplay, optimistic UI updates with rollback handling, and comprehensive interfaces for artifact and NFT management.
Milestone 4: Deployment, testing and performance improvements
We will also establish the production infrastructure necessary for mainnet deployment, including automated deployment scripts for contracts and infrastructure. This phase focuses on rigorous performance benchmarking and QA testing to identify potential optimizations, ensuring game execution is within the 60 seconds requirement. To achieve these we may recur to proof parallelization, transaction batching, optimistic ui updates, client side caching and more techniques. By finalizing these tools and scripts, we ensure the system is production-ready and capable of handling real-world usage at scale.
Milestone 5: Demo, Documentation, Tutorials, etc
We will produce complete project documentation covering the contract architecture, circuit rationale, and integration patterns with Aztec. This includes developer-facing guides for building privacy-preserving games on Aztec, step-by-step tutorials for deploying and extending Dark Forest mechanics, video walkthroughs demonstrating gameplay and technical implementation, and comprehensive API documentation for the plugin system.
Additionally, we will produce technical blog posts, codebase walkthrough, contribution guides, and documentation to facilitate community involvement.
Milestone 6 (Stretch 1): Plugin development and developer guides (~1 week)
From the get go we will design the system to be capable of supporting plugins, in this milestone we’ll go ahead and port some of the already available plugins (discoverable here) to our implementation. We’ll document and share the whole process while encouraging others to join.
Milestone 7 (Stretch 2): Logs indexer service (~2 weeks)
We’ll develop a simple indexer backend service that can stand as a starting point for other aztec projects that depend on it.
Milestone 8 (Stretch 3): Further optimizations (~1 week)
We’ll investigate further optimizations apart from what have been done in phase 4 to see how to take execution time to the next level.
Grant Milestones and Roadmap
Right here we detail our plan to achieve the 5 phases in the 3 months stipulated.
| Milestone | Description |
|---|---|
| 1 (week 1) | Goal: Resolve legacy frontend issues and establish a modernized foundation. Fork v0.6 codebase, fix asset delivery systems, update dependencies to modern versions, ensure development environment is functional. Deliverable: Working local development environment with resolved dependencies, modernized tech stack, functional asset rendering. |
| 2 (week 1-3) | Goal: Contract foundation, circuit conversion, and core game mechanics. Convert Circom circuits to Noir, implement core contract structure with private/public separation, implement all gameplay mechanics (resources, movement, capture, artifacts, spacetime rips). We’ll aim at properly encapsulating new libraries for them to be reused elsewhere. Deliverable: Working Aztec contracts with comprehensive unit and integration tests. |
| 3 (week 4-6) | Goal: Build a performant web client that integrates the aztec contracts of the second phase. Deliverable: Locally playable game. |
| 4 (week 7) | Goal: Infrastructure setup, benchmarking and comprehensive optimization. QA and bug fixing. Deliverable: Production-ready infrastructure, performance benchmarks, report with implemented fixes and optimizations. |
| 5 (week 8) | Goal: Create content for the Aztec developer community. Deliverable: Complete documentation, video walkthroughs, live playable game on mainnet, example plugin code, open source repository. |
Stretch goals
- Plugin development and developer guides
- Logs indexer service
- Further optimizations
Grant Amount Requested
$75,000 USD
Grant Budget Rationale
To achieve the ambitious goal of porting Dark Forest to Aztec within an 8-week window, we have assembled a lean, highly specialized team. This structure ensures that technical debt in the legacy frontend is addressed early, while the bulk of the engineering effort is dedicated to the sophisticated private-state mechanics that define the Aztec gameplay experience.
| Role | Allocation | Justification |
|---|---|---|
| Team Lead | $15,000 | technical architecture, unblock specific hurdles, and ensure all milestones align with the Aztec v0.6 specification. |
| Senior Privacy Engineers (2 FTE) | $30,000 | architect the contracts that manage private/public state transitions end to end. |
| Frontend Engineer (1 FTE) | $15,000 | modernize the legacy tech stack, resolve dependency conflicts, and integrate the new Aztec provider modules into the existing UI. |
| DevOps Engineer | $5,000 | configure the production deployment environment, set up the Aztec Sandbox, and establish the automated CI/CD pipeline |
| Content & Documentation | $5,000 | technical blog posts, developer tutorials for the plugin system, and comprehensive API documentation. |
| Infra, tools, contingency | $5,000 | Hosting, devnet ops, backups |
Ecosystem Commitment
Throughout our journey, we have actively collaborated with leading DAOs and projects, aligning closely with the goals of cutting-edge teams likeAztec. Some of our most impactful contributions include:
- Enigma – A private ERC-20 standard built on Starkware, enabling shielded transfers. [demo] and [repo]
- Aztec Sequencer Node – We’ve successfully run infrastructure contributing to the privacy-first rollup Aztec. [link]
- Noir Stylus Verifier - A Stylus-compatible UltraHonk verifier that bridges Noir’s zero-knowledge capabilities with Arbitrum Stylus [repo]
- Aztec Private Markets - Cross-chain private prediction market poc [repo]
We actively share knowledge and code with the broader community and remain deeply engaged with the evolving Web3 landscape.
Best practices
At WakeUp Labs, we follow rigorous engineering processes, prioritizing secure design, detailed documentation, and maintainable code. All our open-source contributions reflect our commitment to quality and transparency. As part of this we’ve committed to external audits for the project.