Brian Gu

A 2022 analysis by Naavik writes that Dark Forest began as an undergraduate project of Brian Gu, then a student at the Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyMassachusetts Institute of TechnologyThe Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. It received its charter from Massachusetts in 1861, admitted its first students in 1865 and moved from Boston to its present campus in 1916. As of October 2025 it had 11,816 students, and it counts 106 Nobel laureates among members of its community.Open the full entry (MIT), meant as a way to explore a new set of “zero-knowledge” technologies; its earliest version, in 2019, used a one-dimensional ring as its map, which was later expanded into a two-dimensional one. He eventually took a leave from school to work on the game. The article’s conclusion calls it a passion project of “three college students.” The description of episode 141 of the Zero Knowledge podcast likewise calls him a student at MIT and the creator of Dark Forest.⁠[1][2]

MIT Technology Review writes in 2022 that gubsheep, a few days after attending a conference on zero-knowledge proofs, read Liu Cixin’s novel The Dark Forest in one sitting in a bookstore cafe; walking home, he combined ideas from the novel with what he had learned about zero-knowledge proofs, stayed up all night sketching a “cryptographic Dark Forest,” and then persuaded two friends to help build it. The team wanted anyone to be able to check that the mathematical protocol underlying the game was being followed correctly; he said that a traditional server exposing the full history would be “basically starting to build a blockchain,” so they turned to a blockchain, although they knew it was a “pie-in-the-sky” idea, as blockchains are slow and expensive to use.⁠[3]

In a Reboot interview of February 2021 he said: “In 2019, we realized that we could use ZK crypto to make incomplete information games on the blockchain.” In the Software Engineering Daily podcast of June 2021 he said that the project was at first “more of a technology experiment, at least for me personally, than it was a game,” with game mechanics added step by step afterwards; he also said that in 2019 he himself was just getting into zero-knowledge cryptography and exploring the space.⁠[4][5]

A post published by the Dark Forest Team on August 2, 2020, presents Dark Forest as a decentralized, persistent real-time strategy game built on Ethereum with zkSNARKs; planet coordinates are hashed and submitted as commitments together with zero-knowledge proofs, so that locations stay hidden, which the post calls a “cryptographic fog of war.” The first beta, Dark Forest v0.3, was to launch on Ethereum’s Ropsten test network on Friday, August 7, 2020, and run for one week; it was whitelisted and semi-private, with a limited feature set and a prize pool of 1024 DAI, and planets and game assets in the beta had no real economic value. The post states that the game was inspired by Liu Cixin’s Three Body Trilogy, particularly its second novel, Dark Forest, and the thought experiment of the same name; it also credits iden3’s SnarkJS with making efficient in-browser zero-knowledge proving and verification possible.⁠[6]

Naavik writes that since v0.4 in October 2020, Dark Forest has run on Gnosis Chain (previously xDAI Chain); before that it ran on Ropsten, an Ethereum test network, and scaling problems, including crashing the Ropsten network, led to the move. In his podcast of June 2021 he said that the team treated xDai as a “staging environment” for the game while it was still in beta, because gas costs on Ethereum were high, and that the eventual goal was a fully decentralized deployment.⁠[1][5]

On December 30, 2020, the Thiel Foundation named 24 people to the 2020 class of Thiel Fellows. The program, launched in 2011, encourages talented young people to pursue big ideas and start companies instead of attending college; over two years each fellow receives $100,000 and mentorship from the Thiel Foundation’s network of technology founders, investors and scientists. The list, in the format “Name: Hometown, Current Location,” gives a single location for Brian Gu, “Seattle, WA” (Seattle, Washington), and describes his project, Dark Forest, as the world’s first decentralized real-time strategy game, built on Ethereum with zkSNARKs.⁠[7]

The introduction to Reboot’s interview of February 2021 describes him as a “2020 Thiel Fellow.”⁠[4]

On February 17, 2021, Jasmine Sun of Reboot published an interview with him, calling him her good friend and, at his request, referring to him by the pseudonym gubsheep; the introduction states that he was then building Dark Forest and other zero-knowledge cryptography experiments, that he had helped create HackLodge, a program for student developers, and that he spends his time thinking about crypto, communities and digital worlds. He said he had worked on Dark Forest for the last 18 months and described it as a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game built on the Ethereum blockchain that “uses new cryptographic technology to make much richer and more dynamic online worlds than were previously possible.”⁠[4]

He explained that the “dark forest” plot device of the Three-Body trilogy concerns the Fermi paradox, one proposed solution to which is that every civilization acts with maximal suspicion, so that revealing another civilization’s coordinates is “like an informational weapon,” and that he wanted the game to recreate the feeling of discovering an alien race for the first time. Contrasting chess, a game of complete information, with poker, a game of incomplete information, he explained that zero-knowledge cryptography lets players keep information hidden: “a player doesn’t need to know exactly where I am to verify that my move was valid.”⁠[4]

He said that players often defied the Three-Body assumption of maximal suspicion: many sent each other direct messages on Twitter before acting to judge whether someone was hostile or friendly, and went on to negotiate, trade and form alliances, and the community later moved to Discord. He said the team’s approach was to “let people in, see what they do, and try to learn from that,” because “people aren’t going to bend to your theorizing.” He also said that many third-party developers spent hours a day helping newcomers write scripts and that the project had made him very optimistic for the decentralized universe community, while holding that “any system that has economic incentives built in will simultaneously attract the most amoral people”; he said the team had been trying to be deliberate about constructing a community that “self-selects as the former.”⁠[4]

A note at the end of the Reboot piece states that Reboot later received a $5,000 grant from Dark Forest’s associated foundation, and that the interview was written long before any funding was requested or received, when the grantmaking body did not yet exist.⁠[4]

On June 21, 2021, Software Engineering Daily published a podcast interview with him; the episode description calls him a creator of the new game Dark Forest, a space-conquest game on Ethereum that uses zero-knowledge proofs to validate moves without revealing them to other players. In the interview he called Dark Forest “a massively multiplayer online strategy game” in which players expand empires, with millions of planets in its universe and hundreds or thousands of players per round; each round has an objective to make play competitive, and in the latest round the objective was to find celestial objects called asteroid fields, mine resources on them and ferry the resources to trading posts.⁠[8][5]

He explained zkSNARKs with a toy submarine game: players store their coordinates locally, post only a hash commitment on-chain and attach a proof that each move was valid. He said that the game is client-agnostic, so that players build third-party clients and automations, that it has “a very rudimentary plug in system,” and that players can even re-skin it. He argued that “games built on decentralized systems are infinitely interoperable and composable” and hoped that games could host player guilds and organizations and serve as a safe experimentation ground for governance experiments such as DAOs.⁠[5]

On September 30, 2021, Sina Habibian published a conversation with gubsheep about Dark Forest and learnings from building a uniquely crypto-native game; the show notes list the topics as how the game uses ZK SNARKs to hide players’ actions, how it built a community of players and developers, how early DAOs take part, how the game might interoperate with other games, and Layer 2s and the trade-offs involved in choosing a scaling solution.⁠[9]

Naavik writes that built-in plugin support was added to Dark Forest as of v0.5, which players used to improve the interface, simplify tasks and even automate wars, and that starting with v0.6r1 the top 63 players of each official round are manually awarded a planet NFT and a place in the game’s “Valhalla.”⁠[1]

In a post of July 7, 2022, the Dark Forest Team wrote that it had wrapped up the v0.6 cycle in spring 2022 and released Dark Forest Lobbies, and that it was pausing round-driven development for the summer before starting its next production cycle later in the year; the project was then almost three years old, and core team members were spending the summer contributing to other 0xPARC projects and working with Lattice on generic on-chain game infrastructure.⁠[10]

The Devcon VI speaker page describes gubsheep as the creator of Dark Forest who runs applied zero-knowledge research and development at 0xPARC, and lists six sessions with him: the talks “Dark Forest: Lessons from 3 Years of On-Chain Gaming” and “ZKPs and ‘Programmable Cryptography’,” “What to know about Zero Knowledge” with Albert Ni, Barry Whitehat and Vitalik ButerinVitalik ButerinVitalik Buterin is the originator of Ethereum, the author of its whitepaper, and one of its eight co-founders, as well as a co-founder of Bitcoin Magazine. The Ethereum Foundation calls him the inventor of Ethereum; he has long been involved in protocol research and public discussion, but does not control the network as a CEO.Open the full entry, the jointly led “ZK Security Self Led Session” and its opening remarks, and the panel “Web3 is Going Great.”⁠[11]

An article in MIT Technology Review of November 10, 2022, states that more than 10,000 people had played Dark Forest since February 2020, and that players had built in-game marketplaces, automation tools and bots on top of a game that is free to copy, modify and build on. In the article gubsheep said that digital worlds are “becoming the host of more and more of our most meaningful interactions” and wagered that people will be less likely to accept a version of the metaverse governed by a company or any other centralized entity; he wants “a credibly neutral substrate for people to express themselves in relatively unconstrained ways,” which he called “a much more powerful vision of the metaverse.”⁠[3]

An article in designboom of November 15, 2022, states that Dark Forest was developed by “MIT graduate” Brian Gu under the pseudonym Gubsheep, and its project information box lists the designer as “Brian Gu / Gubsheep”; Naavik, by contrast, writes that he took a leave from school to work on the game.⁠[12][1]

On May 28, 2024, he spoke in the seminar series of the Center for Blockchain Research at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry on “Programmable Cryptography - Why and How,” in an event presented by the Stanford Blockchain Club in the Gates Computer Science building and streamed on Zoom. The event page describes him as a co-founder of the 0xPARC Foundation, an applied cryptography research and development organization that has incubated many of the earliest efforts in areas such as ZK identity, ZK machine learning, SNARK coprocessors and Autonomous Worlds, and states that he previously built Dark Forest and supported research and development efforts at the Ethereum Foundation.⁠[13]

Devcon’s video library holds gubsheep’s keynote at Devcon 7 in November 2024, “Keynote: Programmable Cryptography and Ethereum” (about 25 minutes); its description calls programmable cryptography a “second generation” of cryptographic primitives and says that it provides three key affordances, verifiability, confidentiality and non-interactivity, that complement and amplify those of Ethereum, and that the talk discusses how these technologies can reshape the Internet over the next 50 years.⁠[14]

MIT Technology Review writes that gubsheep and others launched the research and development organization 0xPARC, named after Xerox PARC, the research and development company set up by Xerox, and names Justin Glibert as a co-founder of 0xPARC. Naavik writes that 0xPARC was created by Justin Glibert to support and grow innovation on decentralized platforms, that it is a Public Benefit Corporation funded entirely by grants and donations, and that it owns the Dark Forest intellectual property and manages the game’s production; Lattice is a gaming-focused group related to 0xPARC and run by Ludens. The article’s conclusion states that the Dark Forest team was then working on the game engine MUD, to which Dark Forest was to be ported, and on a new game, Ember.⁠[3][1]

The Dark Forest Team’s post of July 2022 states that applied zero-knowledge work in the 0xPARC ecosystem included nightmarket, an encrypted data marketplace built by 0xSage, and heyanon, a zkSNARK-enabled anonymous message board for past Dark Forest winners launched by members of the 0xPARC community.⁠[10]

He said that he played a lot of games as a kid and that it is exciting to try to put together a compelling set of mechanics, and recalled that he came upon Dark Forest’s genre as a kid through Phage Wars on Armor Games, which was essentially a reskinning of it with cells.⁠[5]

In the Reboot interview he said that the seeds of his interest in decentralized technology were planted about five years earlier, when a friend gave him a copy of True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier; he regards Vernor Vinge as having been “one of the first authors to hypothesize about a digitally interconnected world.” He also said that, like other influential science fiction books such as Snow Crash and Ready Player One, True Names makes its most powerful people totally unassuming in the context of traditional power structures.⁠[4]

Thiel Fellowship: Official website: https://thielfellowship.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[15]

X: Public account: https://x.com/gubsheep (opens in a new window).⁠[12]

0xPARC Foundation: Official website: https://0xparc.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[16]