Hello Degentlemen,
It's my pleasure to announce the first sports betting game built using frames, a new social primitive that will change the way developers interact with their users. If you've been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, frames are effectively interactive mini-apps that are embedded in Warpcast, a Twitter-Reddit hybrid client built on Farcaster (the underlying protocol). If you're interested in learning more about what frames are and their potential as a novel consumer product, I recommend reading Packy McCormick's "Framing the Future of the Internet."
The Dice Games is one such interactive mini-game, where participants can risk "dice" in a skill-based sports prediction game in an attempt to climb the leaderboard. Here are the rules:
1) Players can claim 100 dice as a starting balance. Claims are associated with each user's unique Farcaster custody address and can only be minted once. The starting balance will decay at a rate of 20 dice per week (with a lower bound of 20 dice). For example, new entrants during the third week of The Dice Games will start with 60 dice. We want to reward early participants and ensure that late participants are not at an advantage compared to someone who risked their dice early on. To start, locate the "Claim" frame on Bookie's Warpcast profile or pinned at the top of /bookies.
2) Bookies will cast (Farcaster's term for post) a frame corresponding to a real-life sporting event. Players can interact with the frame, inputting how much of their current dice balance they are willing to risk on the outcome of the event. These events will include moneyline bets (eg. Lakers or Suns?), spreads (Lakers to win by 10+?), player props (Lebron to score 25+?), and total bets (over or under 230 total points scored?). Wagering will close exactly one hour before the event.
3) While participants can decide exactly many dice they are willing to wager on any given event (1 to current balance), they stand to lose the full amount they risked if the event outcome is not in their favor.
4) To account for the ensuing degeneracy, all players will be able to claim 10 dice every day. This measure allows all participants to remain active in The Dice Games even if they zero out their entire balance in the first game.
5) Certain events, such as the upcoming Superbowl, will present the opportunity for participants to win outsized returns on the Dice they choose to risk. On top of that, there will be other ways to increase the amount of Dice won in a wager. For example, players who successfully predict multiple outcomes in a row (win streak) will accumulate higher and higher reward multipliers. We hope this tweak introduces a deeper level of strategy, where the optimal decision may be to sit out a day on an event you are less confident in such that you preserve your win streak.
6) All players will be able to access information about their current status via a frame pinned to the top of /bookies. This frame will provide information such as current standing on the leaderboard, total dice balance, win streak, and games played.
7) Players must make a certain amount of bets in a given week to retain their dice balance. The number of wagers is TBD and variable based on the number of events hosted. This measure ensures that 1) Inactive participants/bots/spammers are removed from participation and 2) players who take risk are not at a disadvantage to those who hoard their dice.
(p.s. While The Dice Games is built as a light-hearted sports mini-game, we advise each and every player to hold onto their dice tightly and wager them wisely as they may be valuable one day...)
It is at this time that I want to give a big shoutout to Perl and their novel prediction game that spurred the inspiration for The Dice Games. They've built an awesome and addicting game that we strongly recommend checking out @perl or in the /perl channel on Warpcast.
The Dice Games will begin on February 10th. At this time, players will be able to access the "Claim" frame and seed their initial Dice balance. We will give a day-long grace period for users to discover Bookies, claim their Dice, and get acquainted the rules of the game before launching the first event: Superbowl Sunday! Players will have wager multipliers for this special event, so make sure to be there!
While we think the Farcaster community will enjoy our mini-game, this is but the tip of the iceberg in terms of the possibilities that frames unlocks. We are already looking ahead and have started developing the following:
A frame where users can fill out a bracket (eg. March Madness) and receive a score that corresponds to their correct decision
A frame that parlays bets together for the opportunity win an outsized amount of dice
A frame that acts as a template for players to create their own prop bets
A frame that allows players to create their own frame in order to wager directly against a peer of their choice
To wrap up this article, I want to give a little bit of context about Bookies, what our vision is, and how we plan to achieve it. Bookies is the first on-chain permissionless sports betting exchange with the stated goal of democratizing the sports betting experience. We believe that there are fundamental problems with the traditional sportsbook model that exploits unaware gamblers using large commission fees baked in the odds. While centralized sports betting exchanges aim to address this issue, they fall short on many fronts, in part due to the rails that their platforms exist on. I will be diving deeper into the what, why, and how of Bookies in a longer format article in the future.
For more information, any questions, or feedback, you can contact me @0xcloud on Warpcast.
