In the series "Altcoins on the Block" I will have a look at different altcoins and explain what the coins are all about. In this edition I have a look at Funfair.
FunFair Token: Great potential with real use case for online casinos
FunFair is an ERC-20 token, which is characterized by having a real use case in the online casino business. The central aim of FunFair is to make the online gambling safer and more transparent. The trust and security of the blockchain technology should be used for this purpose.
Funfair platform diagram:
Although the casinos in Germany or the United Kingdom, for example, are subject to strict supervisory rules, manipulation can not be completely ruled out. This is what the company FunFair wants to change with its online casino games. All operations that take place while playing via the blockchain are publicly documented, so that a manipulation is virtually impossible. Everything is absolutely transparent and secure, as FunFair CEO Jez san at the ICE gaming exhibition said:
What is Funfair?
FunFair is a decentralized gaming platform that uses Ethereum blockchain, Smart Contracts and proprietary state channels to provide casino solutions to operators or potential online casino operators.
State Channels are a catch all that covers everything related to this technology. The first State Channel implementation and invention was named the Lightning Network, and it will hopefully see the light of day soon (on the bitcoin network). This is known as a payment channel, since that’s what bitcoin does (payments, doesn’t have smart contracts so doesn’t need to send any other form of data).
I will try to highlight my understanding of the difference between FunFair’s own Fate Channels and Raiden (note: the Ethereum solution), but of course there are other State Channel implementations under development and they too have their own codenames. It’s up to the creators of each implementation to name them however they want, as you can see, so far each individual implementation gets named by its creators.
Funfair Fate Channels are a form of State Channels, just like Raiden is also a form of State Channel – but they’re designed to accomplish different goals. Also, Raiden isn’t ready yet, and is quite late on its schedule, and the developer release hasn’t happened yet, let alone a publicly usable version. To date, Funfair’s Fate Channels are some of the first that we know of that are live that the public can use.
Fate Channels is FunFair’s name for a different type of State Channel service. Thjey use it to generate realtime random numbers as a collaboration between two parties (the player, and the fate channel service). It also does player interactions (player clicks HIT, and gets a new card in blackjack game etc), and it does micropayments with zero gas cost (bets, wins etc). They call it Fate Channels because they use it to produce random numbers. Fate Channels are opened at the start of a game session, and are closed when the player is done (so settlement is fast). The funds are returned to the player’s account immediately the games are over – the player doesn’t leave funds tied up in the state channel (unlike Raiden & other payment/state channels)
Fate Channels also do micropayments (bets, wins) but also player interactions (of game commands, eg: Hit, Stick in blackjack) and collaborative random number generation between player and house. They’re more generalised states, but they are designed to work Player to House – ie, A to B. For now, it is a company server at the other end of the fate channels (while they’re in prototype form) but when the tech is finished the V4 Fate Channels will be fully peer to peer. In Fate Channels, the channel is open only during the game session. When the session is done and the player has finished playing, their funds return to their account immediately (unlike Raiden).
The big goal of FunFair is to allow casino owners to enter the online world, taking advantage of blockchain. FunFair offers its own platform for this purpose. With just a few clicks, it should be possible to create your own online casino on your own corporate website. To choose from a variety of gambling games such as blackjack, roulette, baccarat, craps, slot machines and various types of poker are available. A real application example ("Showcase") can already be tested on this official site.
An elementary component of the FUN project are the FUN tokens, which not only (as with many other blockchain projects) are used to finance the company. Namely, FUN functions within the system as a virtual casino chip and may e.g. In a round of poker or roulette multiplies or even gets lost.
In contrast to the "regular" blockchain transaction, however, gas is not required for every stake, ie a transaction fee. This would be very counterproductive and costly in the numerous missions during a game. This is where the state channels (fate channels) come into play. These allow FUN's games and related transactions to run in real time (faster than the Ethereum blockchain). In addition, the Fate Channels technology only requires a one-off gas fee to start the game session. Further details can be found in the technical whitepaper.
Another huge advantage of FunFair over traditional online casinos is that the player does not have to make a deposit into the provider's wallet. Instead, the player of a FunFair casino can bring the bets into play from his own FUN wallet. So the player never loses control of his own balance to a third party.
A nice summary can be seen in this promo clip:
Future for FunFair
The FunFair roadmap includes the release of the first online casino games for the first quarter of this year. Thus, FunFair can quickly show in practice whether the developments of recent months have paid off. Incidentally, FUN will be running on the Ethereum Mainnet for the first time since the project was launched.
Overall, the market for online gambling is a steadily growing area which is valued at a total of $ 47.1 billion. Of course, this value should not be diluted with the market capitalization of the FUN token because it compares two different metrics. Nevertheless, it shows that behind the idea of the project there is definitely a lot of potential with a large target market.
FUN's price reached its historic all-time high of $ 0.192624 on January 8, 2018. Since the crypto-crash of recent weeks, the price has fallen sharply and is at the editorial time at $ 0.04935. The market capitalization is just under 244 million US dollars. This puts FunFair in 70th place among the largest cryptocurrencies in terms of market capitalization.
Funfair can be acquired on the following crypto exchanges:
1 Binance FUN/BTC
2 Binance FUN/ETH
3 Bittrex FUN/BTC
4 Bitfinex FUN/USD
5 Upbit FUN/BTC
6 C2CX FUN/USDT
7 Bittrex FUN/ETH
8 Bitfinex FUN/BTC
9 OKEx FUN/BTC
10 C2CX FUN/BTC
11 Bitfinex FUN/ETH
12 Upbit FUN/ETH
13 OKEx FUN/ETH
14 OKEx FUN/USDT
15 Gate.io FUN/USDT
16 HitBTC FUN/BTC
17 HitBTC FUN/ETH
18 Gate.io FUN/ETH
19 HitBTC FUN/USDT
20 Livecoin FUN/BTC
21 EtherDelta FUN/ETH
22 Livecoin FUN/USD
23 IDEX FUN/ETH
24 Radar Relay FUN/WETH
25 Livecoin FUN/ETH
26 Cobinhood FUN/BTC
27 Cobinhood FUN/ETH
Personally, I find the concept promising and have invested myself in it a few weeks ago and will continue to keep an eye on FUN. The next weeks are an important time for the whole project. Now the project has to show if the use case is accepted and if FunFair can keep what it promises to the interested parties. The success or failure will presumably have a decisive influence on the course of the cryptocurrency.
I hope this post provides some value to yourself please feel free to use this as a resource to help answer questions and bring awareness to the project of Funfair.
Image Sources:
- Post header created by myself
- https://funfair.io/
Video Sources:
Have a nice day!
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Best regards
Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors