Demystify Smart Contract Vulnerabilities in Blockchain-Enabled Play-to-Earn Game Ecosystems

The rapid evolution of the gaming industry has transformed from the centralized ecosystems to decentralized models owing to lack of true digital ownership of in-game assets. This transformation has led to the emergence of revenue generation opportunities while playing the games such as play to earn (P2E) gaming ecosystems powered by blockchain technology. The blockchain enabled P2E games provide the true digital ownership for their in-game assets, decentralized governance and monetization opportunities. The ecosystem provides the automation through the smart contracts (SC) that plays a governing the asset ownership, reward distribution, secure transactions, thereby providing the transparency and trust. Despite these advantages, the blockchain and SC remain vulnerable to critical security challenges that can result in economic exploitations and diminished players trust. Therefore, the study performs the critical analysis of vulnerabilities across both non-P2E and P2E ecosystems. Further, the study highlighting persistent challenges includes botting, adaptive cheating, Sybil attacks and cross-chain exploits. Moreover, the study identifies the research gaps in existing detection and mitigation mechanisms that are addressed with emerging technologies. The work outlines the future research directions including Artificial Intelligence-Large language models (AI-LLM) based monitoring, domain-specific vulnerabilities detection frameworks, advanced cryptographic techniques for player’s privacy preservation. The findings emphasize the necessity for holistic security approaches that integrates the technical economic and governance dimensions to ensure resilience, fairness and sustainability in the P2E ecosystem.