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.
Golem is a decentralized supercomputer that is accessible by anyone. The system is made up of the combined power of user’s machines from personal PCs to entire datacenters. Golem is able to compute almost any tasks from CGI rendering through machine learning to scientific learning. It utilizes an ethereum-based transaction system to clear payments between providers, requestors and software developers however it is safe because all computations take place in sandbox environments and are fully isolated from the hosts’ systems. The company released Brass in 2016 which includes Blender and LuxRender which are the two tools for CGI rendering. There are three releases that follows which are Clay, Stone and Iron. Golem has recently updated their Brass Beta and the highlight of this upgrade are the streamlined task creation GUI, the support for partial task restart in case of subtask timeouts and the fix that should alleviate the issues with the Docker service on Windows. Other than that, improvements have been made on the Blender verification and transaction tracking subsystems and fixed some minor pain-points in the UX. Transaction history will become more user-friendly with separate tabs for payments and incomes. Apart from that, improvements are made for requestors as well, requestors is now able to add resource file without having to repeat the task creation procedure if they have forgotten to add them beforehand. Grand vision and core features ● Golem is the first truly decentralized supercomputer, creating a global market for computing power. Combined with flexible tools to aid developers in securely distributing and monetizing their software, Golem altogether changes the way compute tasks are organized and executed. By powering decentralized microservices and asynchronous task execution, Golem is set to become a key building block for future Internet service providers and software development. And, by substantially lowering the price of computations, complex applications such as CGI rendering, scientific calculation, and machine learning become more accessible to everyone. ● Golem connects computers in a peer-to-peer network, enabling both application owners and individual users ('requestors') to rent resources of other users’ ('providers') machines. These resources can be used to complete tasks requiring any amount of computation time and capacity. Today, such resources are supplied by centralized cloud providers which, are constrained by closed networks, proprietary payment systems, and hard-coded provisioning operations. Also core to Golem’s built-in feature set is a dedicated Ethereum-based transaction system, which enables direct payments between requestors, providers, and software developers. ● The function of Golem as the backbone of a decentralized market for computing power can be considered both Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), as well as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). However, Golem reveals its true potential by adding dedicated software integrations to the equation. Any interested party is free to create and deploy software to the Golem network by publishing it to the Application Registry. Together with the Transaction Framework, developers can also extend and customize the payment mechanism resulting in unique mechanisms for monetizing software. Check out CoinBureau for the full review of Golem.