Ronan Sandford, Etherplay.io

IBC.technology is an international network of Blockchain professionals. In the new year we will start a series of interviews with our members.

Our opener is Ronan Sandford from Etherplay.io. Ronan has a been developing games professionally for more than 6 years. His expertise cover the full tech stack from client to server, including smart contracts.

Etherplay is a skill game platform where players compete for the high-score. In a similar way that arcade machines require you to pay for every play, Etherplay require the players to pay a small fee to play a game session. The difference is that the fee gets added to a jackpot that is shared among the players with the top scores.

Competitions are organized automatically and run for a limited time. At the end of each competition, players with the top score get a share of the jackpot. To improve the platform and make new games, Etherplay takes 25% of fees (a standard for skill game platform) and will never exceed this amount.

Ronan, how did it feel to launch Etherplay this week?

“It felt really exciting. We run two beta versions before but the live launch was still something a bit scary. The feedback was amazing. I did not expect so many people will talk about Etherplay. To be fair, we were a bit disappointed to not make the news with our second beta, especially the last one where we were giving away real ether. So in the end we did not expect much. We wanted to release though, as we wanted to learn fast. And the response was so great! We made it to hacker news and even though there were some naysayers, the response was globally positive. It set us in a good mood for the future!”

What is the history of Etherplay, when did you discover Ethereum and have the idea?

“Before Etherplay, we had this idea of making a skill game platform so we could make our own games. This was the kind of thing that stays is in the mind but so many other things come in the way that it happens too slow to become real. In October 2015, I remember finding this good looking website with a picture of the far west, talking about some weird world computer (https://web.archive.org/web/20151003054800/https://www.ethereum.org/) :). I was hooked, but it only ended in my bookmarks as I was at my job. Then, later in March 2016 I forgot how I came back to the website, things were looking different and I decided to dive in. I was amazed! I thought I had to do something with it. It was soon that I realized that a skill game platform using Ethereum could work out very well. I actually had other game ideas using the blockchain but Etherplay seemed to be the most realistic one.”

The stake is rising fast, can you give us some numbers already?

“We were not expecting that much, we thought there will be less players than for the last beta since it is not free anymore. This turns out to be false. We had the top 64 score slots filled in 24 hours or so and we just reached a jackpot above 16 ether! The number of transactions are growing at a smaller pace now but it is still growing. As of now, we got 256 unique address that participated with a total of 1598 plays. The average number of play is around 7 per players and keep increasing but a quarter of the players played only once.”

You are one of the earliest startups that went live on Mainnet. How do you plan to cope with the inevitable turmoils (Price volatility, Serenity, Metropolis) in the coming year?

“Price volatility should not affect our players too much since the competition’s duration is one week and might probably be shorter at a later time. Regarding the hard forks, if the Ethereum dev team continue to do their usual great job, and I firmly believe they will, I do not think the forks will affect us much if at all. What could affect us, would be the number of transaction rising, but once again, this should not be insurmountable.”

How do you see smart contract programming after creating Etherplay, where was the difficulty and what lessons were learned?

“For me it was a shock to see how simple it is to make a useful smart contract with few lines of code. Of course there are lots of pitfalls and for that reason the DAO hack was a boon for the Ethereum community. It made developers aware of them. While I think Solidity, the most popular smart contract language is great at giving you that feeling of simplicity, it can make you unaware of these issues. I would love to see a programming language better suited for smart contracts. There is some ongoing research in this department and I look forward to what comes out of it.

This is not only a developer issue, as it affects everybody but I think the gas fee is a problem, especially for a smart contract platform where many transaction are non financial. With Etherplay, since we did not want to sacrifice transparency for gas cost we had to put the minimum necessary info on the blockchain and the fee can sometimes almost be comparable with the cost of fiat currencies unfortunately. I think ethereum would benefit in researching an alternative to mandatory gas fee like a gas consumption limit approach. I touched upon it briefly here (https://github.com/ethereum/EIPs/issues/135). I did not go into the details and did not provided a solution but I would love to see some more discussion around it as I think it is of utmost importance for widespread adoption of Ethereum.”

Can you reveal some of your plans for 2017?

“For 2017 we plan to release more games and polish the player’s experience. Since https://status.im, the ethereum mobile browser just launched its alpha, we would like to explore mobile gaming too. There are many things to do but our launch was very encouraging. Thanks to everyone who played!”

Interview by Roland Kofler