Eristica - Challenge Accepted

Writing about various blockchain startups, I often mention that I'm speaking mostly about an idea or a concept. It might be interesting and promising, but still, it's something that has yet to get technical implementation. Today for a change I'm going to examine an established and successfully working blockchain platform. Also, it's a heavyweight. Founded in 2015 Eristica now is a platform with 1.5 million users. In 2016 the project won a competition among IT startups conducted by Winter Capital and McKinsey. In March 2017 Eristica has been announced as one of the most promising startups at the Mobile Only Accelerator (MOX) event. MOX is a part of SASV - a venture capital company, specializing in creating an investment infrastructure for startups. A year after its inception Eristica project became an inspiration for a Hollywood movie Nerve. The company also has the agreements for monthly pre-installs of its app on smartphones in Asia.

The idea of Eristica came to its founder Nikita Akimov - a graduate from the faculty of mathematical methods at MSU and a talented musician, when one day in 2014 he accepted a bet to learn 15 guitar solos for a couple of weeks. The challenge had been posted on social networks, and at the end, the followers asked for a video proof of Nikita playing those solos. This episode gave birth to the idea of a platform where participants could challenge each other, uploading video footage of their challenges completed. The blockchain based implementation of the system allowed to make it highly automated, with a set of standardized rules related to the type and conditions of the challenge. The rules include providing a video proof which is rated by the community, confirming that the challenge has really been passed. Each challenge is created as a smart contract. By fulfilling the conditions of the smart contract a participant automatically wins the challenge and gets a reward. If he fails to complete the challenge the reward is passed to his opponent. Users not directly participating in challenges can win rewards by betting on the winner of a certain challenge. Also, the platform's API allows integrating the challenge mechanics in the popular multiplayer games. By winning the challenges users gradually increase their ratings which give them an incentive to continue taking on challenges. At the same time, the platform has a potential to become a conveyor belt of viral videos, drawing the attention of million viewers.

One interesting technical aspect of the Eristica platform is that it doesn't use the Ethereum blockchain for its operations. One of the main problems of Ethereum blockchain is its low transaction speed which has already caused some serious problems for the projects with a high level of user activity. A recent example is an incident with the CriptoKitties project, the enormous popularity of which eventually led to the clogging of the Ethereum network. The Eristica's project team finally decided that Ethereum is not a good option for the platform with 1.2 million active users and switched to BitShares. BitShares is a decentralized exchange platform utilizing an industrial-level blockchain technology Graphene. With a performance of 100,000 transactions per second BitShares effectively solves the problem of scalability essential for the projects with a significant number of active participants.

From December 2017 till February 2018 Eristica is conducting a token sale aiming to distribute 687,575,392 ERT tokens.