Online gambling is a polarizing term in society. Some view it as an evil while many others see it as the natural progression of the gambling industry and a fantastic opportunity. The project we’re looking at today are staunch supporters of the latter view. I am of course talking about FunFair a blockchain project that is bringing smart contracts and trust to the online gambling space. With this article we’ll be exploring what’s exciting about FunFair, how FunFair works, and where FunFair is going.

Trust and Gambling

The online gambling industry is quite lucrative with an estimated valuation of $60 billion by 2020 despite the issues that the industry faces. Most of those problems can be summarized by one word — trust. Online casinos and poker websites have made headlines in the past with websites taking larger percentages of online pots than they advertise and executives at those companies cheating on their own platforms. Suffice to say many of these websites can be described as “sketchy.”

Smart Contracts and Trust

One of the areas that cryptocurrency and blockchain is able to make headways for an industry is with trust. Smart contracts allow these platforms to operate on a trustless basis. The user plays the game and gets the payout that the contract and the game states. There isn’t any room for anyone to take an extra cut in this matter or for an individual to not be paid their winnings.

With the implementation of a smart contract system for resolving games the issue of having to trust the platform to not siphon winnings from the user is gone. On top of that since smart contracts are employed those can be independently audited and the code can be reviewed. The match between blockchain and gambling is actually quite a nice one.

FunFair

That marriage between these these two is exactly what FunFair is doing. FunFair itself isn’t a casino it’s a platform that licenses its technology out to those wishing to create their own casino or casino games website. FunFair’s describes this platform license as costing a low fee and that anyone can set it up quite easily. The games currently supported by FunFair include BlackJack, Craps, Video Poker, and many others.

On top of the casino games that are already available FunFair acts as a marketplace for developers to sell their own games out to websites that make use of the FunFair platform. I find that aspect particularly appealing as it allows for growth as new games are invented or developed in a way for gambling.

FUN Token

FunFair has its own ERC20 token called FUN for use on its platform. This token is used in many ways and the most important use cases are that FUN tokens are the only method for buying in-game credits (a spin on roulette or a chip for poker), casinos pay their licensing fee in FUN, fees on the platform are in FUN, and naturally casinos will need a large amount of FUN built up since payouts are instant on the platform.

The Fun Smart Contract

The funfaircontract is the main hub of all the activity on the FunFair platform. Through these contracts is how players play games, get FUN tokens, win FUN tokens, how casinos bring in revenue, and how gamemakers are able to publish their games and receive FUN tokens. A great diagram of how that system functions is below.

Now you may be thinking, “Mike that’s all well and good but I have a serious gambling addiction and I’ll be playing 18 slots at once and clogging the network harder than a crypto kitty release in a bull run.” Don’t worry my good friend FunFair thought of you when designing how their system would function and have a solution called “Fate Channels” that avoids clogging the Ethereum network.

Fate Channels

Fate Channels are FunFair’s solution for having instant payouts and smart contracts on the Ethereum network without slowing it down to an unusable level. A fate channel itself is a “customized state channel.” Practically speaking what this means is that any game session occurs in one of these.

The channel allows for communication between the casino platform and the player and enables features including a random number generator and smart contract settlements for the bets that occur. With this system the only time contact is made with the Ethereum blockchain is at the beginning and end of a game session. This off chain solution allows for lower fees and prevents the clogging of the Ethereum network.

Outlook

The fate channel design is good, but FunFair intends on making it even better. Their goal for 2018 is to release a fourth version of Fate Channels that would make them serverless and operate in a peer-to-peer solution that would reduce operating costs for the casinos. In addition, FunFair is developed in HTML5 that will aid in its adoption as time goes on. With HTML5 the FunFair platform can be accessed via any browser whether from a desktop or a mobile device and doesn’t require any plugins in order to run the games properly.

In terms of the roadmap, FunFair’s mainnet has been in closed beta since May and have subsequently announced RakeTheRake as their first operator once the mainnet goes live. In the closed beta FunFair also has demonstrated working fate channels. At the moment I am looking for announcements regarding the v4 Fate Channels as well as the ending of the mainnet beta.

Price

FUN is currently trading at a price of $0.02 or 303 Sats or 0.00005174 ETH. The total supply of the token is right under 10 billion and the circulating supply is around 5 billion. Given those numbers the current market cap of the project is $105 million. Daily volume on the token was $1 million.

Exchanges

There are several exchanges that currently offer pairings for FUN but the majority of trading for the token takes place on two exchanges. Those exchanges are LATOKEN and Binance. LATOKEN takes the first and third spots by volume with its ETH and LA pairings respectively. The ETH pairing makes up 42% of daily volume while the LA pairing makes up 13%. Binance’s BTC and ETH pairings take the 2nd and 4th spots with 20% daily volume with BTC and 7% daily volume with ETH.

LATOKEN — https://latoken.com/

Binance — https://www.binance.com/

Community

To learn more about FunFair please see the following links.

Website — https://funfair.io/

Whitepaper — https://funfair.io/how-it-works/whitepapers/

Twitter — https://twitter.com/funfairtech

Reddit — https://www.reddit.com/r/FunfairTech/

Conclusion

FunFair has the opportunity to improve online gambling with a blockchain solution that solves the industry’s largest issue of trust. The project does so by making use of the Ethereum network’s smart contracting capabilities and the project itself deftly avoids on-chain network issues with the use of their Fate Channels. What remains to be seen at this point is a successful launch of the mainnet and to pull over operators to begin using their technology. Over time I believe that FunFair casinos will begin to make headway with their instant payments and marketing.

Thank you for reading today’s article! I have two other article’s coming out this week with Mithril on Thursday and SONM on Friday! As always follow me on here or on Twitter @thant1194 or on InvestFeed @thant11 in order to stay up to date on all my articles as I release them. I am not associated with the FunFair project and am a holder of their token. Thank you again for reading. I have to return some video tapes.

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