Fun! We’re thrilled to announce our latest developments of our Ethereum powered gaming technology platform and protocol FunFair.

Today we launch TESTFUN on the Rinkeby and Kovan Ethereum Test Networks. This is the closest stage we are yet of showing how FUN will work once we go live. FunFair’s CTO, Jeremy Longley, will take you through the steps to play with TESTFUN, and show you how the token moves through our breakthrough Fate Channel, the first ever live example of State Channels. Over to you Jeremy:

The latest update to FunFair’s Technology Showcase includes a significant milestone in the development of our platform – integration of the FUN token. The token has been designed to be central to the operation of the platform – players use the token to bet and receive their winnings, and game providers, operators, affiliates and other members of the ecosystem are paid in FUN.

As our platform is still in development, the showcase is currently publicly accessible on the various Ethereum test networks – Rinkeby and Kovan, and so, to demonstrate the integration, we have created a replica ERC20 token on these networks, called TESTFUN.

This new integration replaces the previous on-chain part of the showcase which was designed to demonstrate the speed and gas-efficiency of the Fate Channels technology – which continues to be central to our proposition.

In order to try out the new system, you’ll still need an Ethereum-enabled browser or browser plug-in (such as Mist, Parity or Metamask), and to be connected to Rinkeby or Kovan. But you’ll also need some TESTFUN tokens – so we’ve created a Faucet (which seems to be the accepted term) to give you some to play with; this is integrated directly into the showcase application. It will also dish out a fairly limited amount of Rinkeby/Kovan test ETH if you have none.

Once you have some TESTFUN it’s business as usual – you can start a game session by committing an amount of tokens to the session, play, and then cash out your winnings if you’re lucky enough!

Most of the technical stuff happens under the hood – but we’ve set it up so you can use tools like https://etherscan.io/ to see the transactions and the tokens moving around, as we’ve continued to adopt the ERC20 standard for our token.

Once you’ve opened a game session (which you, as the player, do by making a transaction on the Ethereum network) you can see the tokens move in the transaction log – an example here:

Image 1. Opening of a Fate Channel

You’ll see your tokens being moved into the control of the Fate Channel contract. You’ll also notice other tokens being moved in. These belong to the House – the other side of the Fate Channel – and this guarantees that the tokens are locked and so available if you win them!

Then the gameplay happens – following the slightly complex reverse-hash-chain RNG system and state update signing processes as detailed in the white paper – until you decide to cash out.

At this point you’ll see another transaction on the blockchain:

Image 2. Closing of a Fate Channel

This shows the closing of a Fate Channel session. Once all the data has been verified in the Fate Channel contract, which had temporary control of the tokens, it releases them back to the relevant owners – the player and the house.

You’ll also notice a third token transfer – this is our burn mechanism kicking in – where tokens are destroyed as part of their use in order to decrease the overall supply of tokens. As Jez San has regularly said on our community channels, we are still evaluating the economic and legal implications of this approach, but we’ve built it in anyway so that it’s ready. Vitalik Buterin recently posted positively about this approach (http://vitalik.ca/general/2017/10/17/moe.html) which he calls a Sink. At the moment the amount of tokens burned is based on the player’s stake. This is extremely unlikely to be the final approach, but we wanted to demonstrate the concept at this point. This will also be the point where other fees for operators/game developers etc are paid.

To try out TESTFUN, please visit our showcase here.

We’re always keen to hear what you think, please do connect with us on Discord and Telegram.

FunFair is pleased to be a Global Sponsor of Devcon3 (Ethereum Foundation’s annual developers conference), which starts on November 1. Hope to see you there!