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.
Pundi X is the project that wants to make spending crypto as easy as a credit card. Creators of the NPXS token hope that it will one day be used on their Ethereum-based Point-of-Sale devices. This approach could give basic banking services to underdeveloped regions like Latin America and Indonesia. One of the most notorious pain points in crypto is the ability to actually make purchases. Pundi X cryptocurrency plans to change all that by distributing hundreds to thousands of point-of-sale smart devices to retailers so they can accept payment in the form of NPXS, the network’s proprietary crypto token. If it can distribute the devices for free and with lower transaction fees than current card and mobile payment solutions provide, it’s a grand-slam idea. Pundi X raised $35 million during its ICO from September 2017 through January 21, 2018. 35,000,000,000 NPXS (at the time known as PXS) were sold during the ICO presale and crowd sale. The team retained 15,750,000 and another 1,750,000,000 was distributed to early investors and the rest was held by Pundi X for further development and marketing. It also set aside 2 percent of sold tokens to fund bounty programs across social media and online platforms. The Pundi X team are a talented group of technologists and entrepreneurs, which seems to be exactly what this project will need for success. In general the management team is comprised of computer engineers turned serial entrepreneur. The glaring exception to this is CEO and founder Zac Cheah, who was formerly an HTML games developer, but perhaps this is why he surrounded himself with such a strong team. The President of Pundi X, Constantin Papadimitrou, has a long history of founding successful fintech companies, and scaling them, which makes him an ideal fit for a project that will need rapid growth and adoption. The CTO/COO Pitt Huang created and sold his first business by the age of 25 and went on to create and sell several more business, including one that had over 200 employees. The company is working on developing a card, which they are naming the XPASS card, which will work together with the mobile app and wallet, enabling payments and deposits by card (a familiar medium for most) that are pulled from the mobile wallet. In addition, users should be able to see the current market price of each cryptocurrency before paying for goods and services, allowing them to pay with the cryptocurrency that brings the best value at the time. This ability to pay for things easily with cryptocurrencies is what will finally give them real value in a widespread sense. Pundi X has taken on an impressive and ambitious task in tackling what could amount to everyday adoption of cryptocurrencies by the masses, if their vision is realized. The technology seems appropriate for what they’re attempting, and the delivery of the first 500 POS devices shows that there is substance behind their efforts.'