With growing popularity of daily fantasy sports, the industry’s worth has shot up to 7 billion dollars. Millions of players over the world are hooked to daily fantasy sports because of the kind of concept it proposes.
The flip side to it poses another story — the industry is plagued with several problems like managing ownership of in-game assets, distribution of dividends, transparency, payment processing, complex verification. Other hiccups that the gaming industry has to face need to deal with online crime. Such instances have become fairly common in today’s world. Crimes like identity theft, stealing crypto, duping of in-game assets need to be dealt with too. Only then a user can be a part of daily fantasy sports with freedom.
The paradigm shift from centralised solution to a decentralised one has promised many desirable changes. MyDFS combats with the problems using blockchain technology and smart contract feature. The gaming platform created by MyDFS guarantees:
-Decentralised and transparent gaming process
-Quick micro-transactions
-Fast and easy user verification
-Automated processes
-Easy to manage in-game assets
-Protecting user’s information
This aim of this article is to throw light upon inner working of MyDFS platform.
MyDFS backbone infrastructure is made up of multiple layers. The most pressing processes are based on smart contracts. Examples of these processes can be in-game storage, token transactions et al. The smart contract comprises of multiple layers:
- Main dispatcher contract
- MyDFS token contract
- ICO contract
- Player statistics contract
- Game contract
- Brokerage contract
Let’s go through each layer at an individual level.
Main Dispatcher Act (MDA)
MDA is a mediator between multiple other contracts and the system. It accepts requests, and sends out responses.
Functions of MDA are as follows:
·Create/manage games
·Manage tokens viz a viz, deposit/withdraw tokens
·Join sponsored games
·Join games
·Change player permissions
The MDA keeps the following data: player balances, broker and stats contract addresses, game token address.
Token Contract (TC)
TC is responsible to deal with user balance efficiently and maintain a record of all occurred transactions. TC lets the user transfer tokens to and from wallet on MyDFS, fetch balances, facilitate cross-balance transfers for brokerage.
The TC generates and receives events related to token transfers. The token contract keeps the following data: Token name and token supply data.
Player Statistics Contract (PSC)
PSC maintains user statistics so that they can be used across different games to maintain integrity.
The PSC allows the user to:
·Approve and make changes to user statistics
·Change existing statistics
·Set and change the user brokerage fee (a fee taken by that user to play using a broker’s tokens)
·Get statistics about a user’s game count, win and loss percentage, tokens lost and won
The PSC keeps the following data: game addresses for all games played by the player, user statistics (total wins/losses, game count, etc).
ICO Contract
The ICO contract lets users buy tokens during any sale period: Pre-ICO and ICO.
The ICO contract lets you:
·Get the balance of Ethereum deposited by any of the buyers
·Check if the soft cap and hard cap has been reached (and stop selling tokens after the hard cap)
·Issue bonuses dependent on purchase amount
·Withdraw Ethereum after the sale is over, if the soft or hard cap has been reached
·Transfer tokens to buyers, including bonus tokens
The ICO contract keeps the following data: The ICO beneficiary address, soft and hard cap goals, the amount of ETH already raised, the token price, and the total existing bonuses.
MyDFS also accepts currencies apart from ETH, but those are manually processed and still require the purchaser to have an ETH wallet. When this happens, we first turn the amount we received as other cryptocurrency into ETH, and then deposit the requisite number of tokens into the buyer’s ETH wallet.
Game Contract (GC)
The GC stores and manages data of every game in the system, and determines the winners of the game.
The GC lets you:
·Join a game with a lineup created by a player
·Join a game with a lineup created by a player and sponsored by a broker
·Start, finish, or cancel a game
·Return the state of an existing game
·Calculate player scores using game statistics and sports data
·Calculate prizes and their distribution
The GC keeps the following data: game scoring rules, service fee, current game state, amount of tokens in the game, scores for every athlete in the game, player list.
Brokerage Contract (BC)
The BC lets users “hire” other pro users to play for them. Using open player statistics, they can choose players and give them a credit to use to enter any game. The entry fee is only taken from the brokering player when the pro player chooses to enter a game. If he or she wins, the broker receives a full winning amount, minus fee that is set by the pro player.
The BC lets you:
·Hire a pro player with a fee fixed at the time of the hire
·Cancel the hire
·Set a maximum available budget to be used by the player to join games
·Transfer tokens from the broker’s balance to the game the player has chosen to enter
The BC keeps the following data: list of player-to-player contracts (user and broker addresses, agreed-upon fees).
These six layers perform very exclusive functions but are integrated with one another thereby proving a decoupled architecture for enhanced performance, speed, experience. The platform is completely based on blockchain which can be accessed at the ease of player’s smartphone, which also makes the ecosystem highly transparent, accountable, easy to access. Through efficient orchestration of multiple layers with one another with amalgam of blockchain, problems like delay in transactions, and lack of transparency can be solved.
When such rudimentary problems are addressed with such efficiency, it’s safe to say that MyDFS is truly a 21st century solution to play daily fantasy sports the right way.