FIRSTBLOOD aims to be a decentralized wagering platform for P2P competitive gameplay. People can bet money on their own 1v1 or team-v-team games, such as Counter Strike, Global Offensive, DOTA 2, and League of Legends. Anyone can challenge friends or strangers to a match, and a network of nodes will verify results. Anyone can also organize tournaments or leagues for people around the world.
The network will run on Ethereum, smart contracts will distribute the wagered funds (in the short-term, ETH), and special nodes will automatically verify game results. The nodes are called “witness nodes,” and they earn fees for serving as nodes.
The asset traded in BITTREX (and sold in the ICO) is the 1ST Token, which lets its holder serve as a witness node.
What is the market for this platform?
One thing to clarify: this is not a gambling platform. Players wager on their own outcomes, not the outcomes of others. This allows the team to skirt anti-gambling laws that apply to eSports. Their target market is different: individuals who want to pay to compete for money.
We imagined three market segments for this service. All are mostly hypothetical, because the means of easily doing this have been limited.
Minor leagues of eSports: a collection of independent semi-professional tournaments in which amateur teams can compete for attention and eventual sponsorship in more established eSports circles. The feeder system for many eSports professional leagues is often relatively small and draws directly from ranked ladder matches, where individuals and teams are paid nothing and have neither visibility nor support. It’s the equivalent of a “walk-on” in sports. We imagine that a decentralized platform like FIRSTBLOOD could let anyone start organizing tournaments. Aspiring eSports professionals could gain visibility and established eSports teams could more easily scout for talent.
Intramurals of Gaming: regular of casual matches between organized teams. A group of friends will build a team in a given game and on a set time each week, compete with another such amateur team in their league. These players don’t want to play professionally anymore than community-league baseball players want to be professionals. But they would enjoy something more coherent than the equivalent of pick-up gaming, and they’d be willing to pay a small fee.
Casual individual betting: players would will actually challenge friends and strangers and wager money. We imagine this as the equivalent of a group of friends playing casual poker (with a modest buy-in) or wanting to raise the stakes on a LAN party night.
The fourth potential market segment are people who don’t want to wager but want to go through FIRSTBLOOD anyway. Without some other compelling features on First Blood, players who don’t want to wager seem unlikely to migrate to the platform.
How big are these markets–and how does that translate to 1ST tokens?
Holding 1ST tokens entitles the holder to serve as a witness in verifying match results. For most matches, this will be done automatically, and a node’s chances of being selected to serve as the witness will depend on their proportional holdings of 1ST–up to a maximum of 1% per game if the node holds 1% or more of all tokens. Serving as a witness earns fees, though the formula hasn’t been determined. In this, we assume the fee will scale based on the amount wagered but that there will be a minimum fee even for games not involving wagers. Being a witness also entitles one to serve as a jury member to resolve disputes in case the witness software malfunctions or someone contests its results. This also involves (yet to be revealed) fees. We assume all fees scale with the amount wagered rather than being a flat fee, so the platform can take advantage of large semi-professional activity involving big bets.
It’s not the total size of the markets that matter: it’s the portion of those markets that might flow through FIRSTBLOOD and be eligible for tokens. For competitive matches, this will be similar to prize pools in tournaments. The total market for eSports is huge and projected to crest $1 billion by 2020, but most of that is in advertising, licensing, and ticket sales. None of these need to be ‘wagered’ and would occur off platform–or at the very least, would not involve the witness nodes.
FIRSTBLOOD crowdsale in within minutes of launching: $5.5 million raised in what must be the quickest major cryptocurrency crowdsale to date. FIRSTBLOOD's “Power Hour” (in which 1ST could be purchased 170/ETH) became a power ten minutes.
Many factors contributed to the rapid sale. The marketing behind the project in both English and Chinese was well orchestrated. How-to guides for different Ethereum wallets made navigating the smart contract process seamless. Finally, First Blood partnered with Chinese exchange Yunbi to host the sale to a Chinese-speaking audience. Yunbi was able to purchase 1ST in bulk to sell to their users. The contract address shows two large transactions: one over $3 million and another over $1.5 million. Yunbi reports that 434 people successfully bought through the exchange (726 people tried). At time of writing, the Ethereum smart contract address showed over 600 transactions, many invalid because they were sent too early or sent too late.
Demand was so high, First Blood recommended increasing the gas for the transaction to 300,000, and judging from reactions on social media, gas amounts may have been the difference between some people contributing and others not
The token started to be traded in BITTREX last June 6th 2017. The ICO price was 170 tokens per ETH, that is, 0.00588235. Now it's 0.00357678. In terms of BTC, this means that at the crowdsale time a 1ST token was worth 0.00117647BTC (taking the ratio at that time 0.02 BTC/ETH). Since it started in the exchange, price has fallen to 34k levels (0.00034000). As far as they are accomplishing the roadmap, and with some exciting news still to come very soon, longterm holders, as well as other traders will keep pushing price upwards, at least to crowdsale levels, where it already traded in June 2017.
Sources:
www.coinmarketcap.com
www.bittrex.com
www.smithandcrown.com
