FunFair is an Ethereum-based platform for online casino gaming. Targeting the $47B online gambling market, FunFair isn’t actually a casino. Instead, the underlying gaming technology is licensed out to casinos and other gambling platforms. The FunFair team is attempting to solve some of the biggest problems online casinos face: slow performance, high operating costs, and lack of user trust. Through the use of blockchain technology and Fate Channels, an in-house built version of state channels, the products they license have the potential fix all of them. FUN is an ERC-20 token that you use in every part of the FunFair platform. It’s the only token accepted for in-game credits, how game creators in the marketplace are paid, what casinos must pay their licensing with and receive revenues in, and all fees on the platform must be paid in FUN. A total of 11,000,000,000 FUN tokens were created on June 22, 2017, and no more will be created. With a fixed supply, the token is deflationary and should experience sharp increases in price over time as demand for it increases. Furthermore, the FUN that’s paid as fees will be burned for the first two years which should further drive price upwards. Casinos can also stake the FUN tokens in their bankrolls to receive additional dividends. The 30+ person FunFair team is based out of London and is led by Jez San, OBE. San’s entire career has revolved around entrepreneurship and the computer gaming industry. He founded Argonaut Software as a teen and created the first chip to power 3D games like Star Fox and Harry Potter. Rounding out his resume, San also founded the 3D online poker room, PKR, and is an investor in one of the world’s leading cryptocurrency exchanges, Kraken. Other members of the team are just as impressive. Jeremy Longley, founder and CTO, co-founded PKR with San and has over 15 years of experience managing development teams. FunFair COO, David Greyling, was previously the International Director of William Hill – a worldwide betting and gaming company. FunFair is attempting to enter the gigantic online gaming market by providing a solution that’s unique to the blockchain industry. Instead of acting as a casino, the company is licensing out their technology to other casinos which helps to mitigate their liability and risk. The project already has a working product and plans to launch early this year. With the wealth of experience that the team has in the gaming space, it’s hard to see this project failing. If FunFair can overcome the market domination of current incumbents using traditional technology, blockchain-based casino games could be the new industry paradigm.
EtherZero, abbreviated ETZ, is a hard fork on ethereum providing no-fee, high expansibility, real-time transaction or operation feedback services. Aiming to be a general-purpose smart contract platform, ETZ helps developers set up DAPPs that not limited in finance and business scope, but those more frequently used in daily life, to popularize decentralized services to more people and industries. ETZ eliminates the gas fee system from Ethereum network core and adds a Transaction Restriction Policy Protocol layer that associates the threshold, frequency, depth, etc. of initiating transactions with the account balance to combat DDOS like attacks. In particular, ETZ also draws on DASH's two-tier network architecture built with Masternodes transaction verification network and blockchain ledger layer, and its built-in community autonomous system to provide users with real-time operation feedback and high transaction concurrency, no longer need to wait for a long transaction confirmation time. ETZ picks the proven experience of Ethereum on smart contracts, removes its less scalability gas-based fee system and designs a fully accountable trading limit and security strategy against DDOS Class attacks. The final two-tier network composed of the main node and pow consensus layer laid the foundation to achieve free of charge, high concurrency, real-time transactions, independent evolution and several other features. What does no-fee mean to DApp Dev? Taking a simple Todolist DApp as an example, its decentralized implementation can be applied to the team task decomposition process, which requires all participants in the project to know the tasks of other members. Each task is a team consensus result with demand of traceability. The application involves registration of members, additions, deletions and alterations of tasks. According to Ethereum development requirements, all of these operations require gas consumption, which is clearly unreasonable for the users of the application. While in EtherZero, the transaction initiation frequency and the execution depth of smart contracts will be positively related to the balance possessed by the account. This mechanism is similar to POS, it takes into account the fair use of bandwidth and set a relatively high capital threshold required to launch a DDOS attack by malicious attackers while providing free services. This kind of limited and cost-effective free mechanism will spread the decentralized application into the scene of life.