Hidden Warrior: the power of privacy in a blockchain game
In today's digital world, the question of privacy often stays in the shadows—until we run into its absence. Yet privacy is essential both for personal life and for technology. Hidden Warrior is a new pixel RPG project on the Solana blockchain, where privacy is taken to the absolute. Our game features TURN‑BASED ENCRYPTED BATTLES: all moves and calculations are hidden from outsiders.
only the final outcome is revealed to everyone.
In this article, on behalf of the Hidden Warrior team, we'll talk about how the game works and about Arcium—the platform it is built on—why privacy matters in the crypto world and everyday life, and share a few philosophical thoughts on the value of privacy.
Hidden Warrior is a turn‑based strategy game in a retro style where players create unique pixel warriors with secret attributes and abilities and send them into secret duels. All fighter parameters and the battle algorithms stay hidden during the match, which is why players only see only the final result of the fight. This ensures fair and unpredictable gameplay: none of the participants can peek or compute the outcome in advance.
In traditional RPGs, combat formulas are usually transparent ( critical hit chances, ability damage, etc.), allowing advanced players and cheaters to study and potentially exploit them. In Hidden Warrior, the combat logic is encrypted: the rules are not revealed either in the client or in the smart contract; all calculations occur inside a special protected Arcium environment. This makes the system resilient to reverse‑engineering and analysis—unpredictable for cheaters yet fair to honest players.
Put simply: strategy and luck win — not the ability to read the game's code.
It is important to note that Hidden Warrior is built on Arcium technology. Our game became one of the first applications demonstrating Arcium's capabilities in practice. Where other projects are forced to disclose game mechanics, we do the opposite thanks to Arcium—we hide them, and thus deliver a new experience for players. In Hidden Warrior, privacy is not a secondary option but a CORE PRINCIPLE embedded into the game's design from the very beginning.
This opens interesting opportunities going forward: for example, your warrior's true abilities may be revealed only within an encrypted battle. This approach creates special intrigue and depth: the rarity and power of characters manifest through secret gameplay, which adds excitement while protecting the game from unfair tactics.
To realize such private battles, we needed an innovative platform—Arcium. What is it? Arcium is, in essence, an encrypted supercomputer on top of the Solana blockchain. Technically speaking, Arcium is a decentralized computation layer that, using advanced cryptography (in particular Secure Multi‑Party Computation (MPC)), allows arbitrary logic to run over fully encrypted data. Put simply, developers can encode any logic in a smart contract—game rules or a financial formula—and that logic will execute across the network without revealing the inputs or the details of the process. The Arcium network distributes computation among nodes so that none of them sees the full information, but together they arrive at the correct result.
Only that result is committed to the blockchain in the clear.
For Hidden Warrior, Arcium became the ideal foundation. During a match, players choose actions and use abilities—these inputs are sent into Arcium encrypted. Specialized nodes (MPC clusters) process the turn confidentially, and only the outcome of the duel is written to the chain and becomes known to everyone. Neither observers, nor opponents, nor even the nodes themselves learn which move was used or the exact damage calculation—until the battle is over. This level of secrecy is made possible by the combination of cryptographic methods built into Arcium. In effect, we get a "black box": inputs go in, only the result comes out, while the system guarantees the correctness of computation.
It's worth emphasizing that Arcium is not just about games. It is a general‑purpose infrastructure designed to bring confidentiality to many blockchain domains. With Arcium one can build:
For example, anonymous trading venues (dark pools) or lending, where trade data stays encrypted. One can implement classic games on smart contracts like poker or rock‑paper‑scissors with full fairness—players' moves remain hidden until the winner is revealed. Finally, even training AI on encrypted data becomes realistic, which allows multiple parties to collaborate on valuable datasets without risking data leakage.
Thanks to Arcium, a new design space opens up for decentralized apps where privacy is the norm rather than an exception.
We are convinced: privacy is critical—in cryptocurrencies and in life. Privacy underpins human dignity and freedom; it gives us room for thought and action without constant surveillance. In society, privacy protects freedom of speech and expression and the right to private life.
It's often said that privacy is not just an individual good but a prerequisite for a healthy free society.
We often don't notice the value of privacy until we begin to lose it. Consider everyday examples: we seal an envelope assuming only the addressee will read the letter. We set passwords on accounts and close the curtains in the evening—not because we're hiding something bad, but because we feel comfortable when the personal stays personal. The same applies to modern tech: we message in apps confident that outsiders aren't reading our messages; we use bank cards expecting purchase data to remain confidential.
Privacy surrounds us with invisible protection every day.
On the one hand, open chains like Bitcoin or Solana provide transparency—every transaction is visible to everyone. That's good for trust in the system, but bad for user confidentiality. Your balance and financial actions can become public.
Without additional measures, anyone can track which NFTs you bought or where you sent tokens. Such a totally "transparent wallet" is unlike our usual bank account, whose details are private. Moreover, without privacy, decentralized technologies risk turning into tools of total monitoring, even though they were conceived as technologies of freedom.
Without reliable privacy solutions we risk turning powerful blockchain tech into surveillance machinery instead of instruments of liberation—which undermines the very principles of decentralization.
Therefore, the introduction of privacy is not only a technical task, but also a moral imperative for the future of the crypto industry.
Fortunately, awareness of privacy's importance is growing. In recent years the crypto community has produced many projects aimed at protecting user data—from privacy coins and transaction mixers to confidential‑computation platforms like Arcium. Initially such solutions were perceived as niche: they often required extra effort, and many people considered privacy an optional luxury. That hurt mass adoption—the average user didn't think about data protection as long as "things just worked." But incidents of data leakage and the way open‑ledger transparency can scare off enterprises have shown that privacy is indispensable. The approach is changing: teams are now building privacy into the foundation of new applications, making it an integral part of the architecture—as Arcium does.
Cryptography—the science of encryption and protective protocols—comes to the rescue. One key tool is zero‑knowledge proofs. This technology lets you prove a statement without revealing underlying data. The classic example: you can prove you know a wallet password without revealing the password itself. Zero‑knowledge proofs underpin anonymous transactions (e.g., in Zcash‑like systems) and confidential smart contracts. Another approach is the aforementioned secure multi‑party computation (MPC), where a task is split among several nodes so that each sees only encrypted fragments of the data.
Together the nodes compute the correct result, but none of them learns the original private inputs.
MPC forms the foundation of Arcium, which allows it to process complex logic (as in Hidden Warrior) without exposing details.
Previously on Solana there were attempts to add privacy at the application layer: for example, private‑transaction protocols such as Otter Cash and Light Protocol used zero‑knowledge proofs to hide senders and recipients. Arcium team previously worked on Elusiv, which gave users a convenient way to make confidential transfers and swaps on Solana. These projects demonstrated that privacy is technically feasible but did not become widespread. Some teams pivoted; others ran into the reality that many users weren't ready to complicate their workflows for the sake of abstract data protection.
The conclusion: privacy should not be a bolted‑on feature—it needs to be integrated deeper into the infrastructure so that using it is simple.
That is the principle implemented in Arcium: to make private computation a standard, first‑class capability of the blockchain. As a result, new applications (like Hidden Warrior) can offer an experience where data protection is built‑in from the start and does not require special actions from the player or user.
For our team, privacy is not just a technological trick but a philosophy. We believe privacy strengthens trust. When a player knows the battle rules are hidden and that nobody can peek at them, it's clear that victory is earned fairly. Privacy is about fairness and equal conditions—whether in a game or a financial transaction. It is also about creativity and intrigue:
by hiding details, we create room for surprises and unique strategies that can't be copy‑pasted from a guide on the internet.
The point isn't about hiding something bad. It's about having control over what becomes public and what remains personal. The freedom to choose the degree of openness—that's what privacy gives us.
In Hidden Warrior, players can show their achievements and victories to the world (battle results are public), while their tactical ideas, characters' secret abilities, and train of thought during the fight remain theirs alone.
This balance of openness and secrecy is, in our view, what makes the game engaging and demonstrates the potential of a more private internet.
In Hidden Warrior we aim to show that privacy can be a force for good: protecting fair play, giving users a new kind of experience, and preserving the spirit of decentralization. Our game, built on Arcium technology, is just one example of how innovations in confidential computation are changing the rules.
Privacy is becoming the foundation on which new Web3 applications are built, where users retain control over their data and experiences.
We are confident that the future of the blockchain industry is tightly connected with privacy. The ability to play, communicate, and exchange value without the fear of total surveillance—that is worth striving for. In Hidden Warrior we are already on this path, combining a retro gaming spirit with advanced cryptography. We invite you to join us in the arena—where strategy and courage prevail.
and your privacy remains securely protected.
This post explores the intersection of gaming, privacy, and blockchain technology through the lens of Hidden Warrior—a project that makes privacy the core of the gaming experience.