Hello Steemit, pleased to meet all of you. Allow me to introduce myself, I'm Nicolas and I go by Nico or NicoDFS. I wanted to share some of my story as a developer in the fantasy sports industry over the last few years and my recent journey into cryptocurrency.
Let me start with where my love of fantasy sports began. It all started with an argument over who was the best quarterback in college football. One Saturday afternoon watching football with my two best friends, I casually said that Drew Bledsoe was probably the best QB the the country and could win the Heisman Trophy. The idea was imminently shot down by the two die hard Miami Hurricanes fans. The Canes were having a great season with Gino Torretta leading the offensive attack. Anyone remember Wide Right 1 and 2?
This argument went on for days, we talked about it at lunch time, after school and non stop on weekends. With Torretta playing in the Big East and Bledsoe in the PAC 10 it was unlikely we'd see the two in a match up. About a week later it expanded to wide receivers and running backs and which QB, WR and RB combo would be unstoppable.
Now for anyone who's not a 90's kid the Internet was not really a thing yet so we had never heard the term "fantasy sports" even though it did exist back then. So one Saturday afternoon we ended up making our own 3 team league and called it Tecmo College Bowl after one of our favorite games out at the time. Torretta ended up winning the Heisman Trophy that year which put my team in last place but we keep the league going until the three of us parted ways after high school.
Fast forward to 21 years to 2013, my new brother in-law was in town for a visit and like some guys just getting to know each other the conversation lead to sports and if I played in any fantasy leagues. We both were playing in season long leagues on anf off again. Then comes the question that set me down my current path, "have you heard of DraftKings"?
Being a web developer and having looked into sports betting sites as soon as I saw the Daily Fantasy Sports business model I knew immediately that was the next web development project that I would be doing.
After about a year of development and the help of 5 other devs I hired we launched and sold our first white label product and branded it MajorLeagueDFS. Everyone with a sports blog, betting site, on-line casino and even sports investment groups were emailing me requesting demos. I was getting 3 to 5 demo requests a week and even more as the next NFL season approached.
Things were going great until some idiot from one of the major two sites DraftKings and Fanduel "allegedly" looked in their database and found the top winning users and copied their lineups and used them to win a $300,000 tournament on the other site since employees were forbidden to play on they site they worked for. This caused a lot of public outrage, mainly lead by politicians ready to put their hands in everyone's pocket with new regulations. Late night talk show hosts were quick to make a joke of the whole thing. The Fantasy Sports Trade Association did a horrible job of self regulating. The end result is some U.S. States now charge up to $50,000 USD just to register and have to pay additional fees on revenue earned by residents of that state. But it dose not stop there, some states require your software to be audited, reviewed and certified by a third party which will cost another $25,000 USD.
These large fees make it difficult for smaller startups to enter the business and lock in DraftKings and Fanduel the only game in town. If all the FUD, new fees and regulations that were not bad enough let me introduce the jackasses called Fantasy Aces. They committed the biggest sin of all and used player deposits to pay for corporate expenses. When players wanted to cash out they were left holding the bag until another company came in and bought the database and offered to cover the money lost by users.
Now I found myself watching a game I love that brings back the best memories of growing up and adapting to a foreign country (I was not born in the US) being over regulated into an exclusive club and some of the members of that club decided to outright steal from players and cause a major trust issues between players and sites.
Despite all the the obvious obstacles I decided I would move forward and finally launch our own branded site. So I looked to bitcoin and cryptocurrency for solutions. The open ledger of a blockchain will easily prove to users that their deposited funds are kept away from corporate accounts used to pay for marketing and other expenses. If a site wants to hold a large tournament with a guaranteed prize pool, users can also verify the site has those funds available to payout.
Additional benefits include a game changing discount in payment processing fees compared to using traditional payment processors. Another reason fantasy sports needs cryptocurrency is charge back and fraud protection. Some sites did not expect the massive amounts of credit card and paypal fraud that would be coming their way causing even more site shutdowns. And just so you know some of these sites that fell victim to these scams were not small "hobby" sites, they were sites like Drafttser who was lead by a very well funded investment groups.
To solve this and some other issues I created DFSCoin to be used on my sites and others as in game currency. I build a small but talented team of marketers, fantasy sports fans and other fantasy sports developers who where seeing the same problems I saw. Now today we are in the midst of our ICO and getting ready for the NFL season that starts in just a few short weeks. We hope DFSCoin will not only solve the problems our industry faces but also introduce the tens of millions of fantasy sports players around the globe to the world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains.
To further our efforts we are going to make our full API suite free to use by anyone who wants to run their own Fantasy Sports site and use DFSCoin to power it. The only requirement will be to hold enough DFSCoin to cover any user deposits and guaranteed prize pools they'd like to host. These sites will form a global network of players.
Please checkout our sites, http://DFSCoins.com, https://DraftDaily.com and https://FanLucci.com and others coming soon.
