Today we are releasing our first in a long list of games planned for the Steem Blockchain.

Cupz.io is a Provably fair, Peer 2 Peer gambling app with a 1 in 3 chance of winning.

You will be presented with 3 cups, under one of the cups a ball is hidden. Each player in the game selects a cup and the correct guess takes the other two players’ stake minus the developer’s commission of 2%.

The commission will be used to fund further development of Cupz and other games, pay for referrals and fund a profit share scheme. We haven’t decided on the format for this yet, but we are leaning on the side of a larger payout for a small amount of players rather than tiny amounts shared between all players.

What does Provably fair mean?

The game is set up in such a fashion as to prevent any interference in the outcome. The winning cup is calculated using a Pseudo Random Number Generator which takes a seed that comprises a server seed and a client seed. At the start of each game new seeds are generated. The server seed is encrypted and posted to the Blockchain and the client seed is displayed on the website. On game completion the server seed, the encrypted server seed and the client seed are posted to the Blockchain along with the winners details. We have posted a REPL Snippet which allows you to take these details and check that the server seed does in fact match the posted encrypted seed and that using those two seeds plus the current block number at the time of placing the last guess as the seed for the Random Number Generator produces the same result for a given game.

Blockchain

The application Frontend interacts with the Steem Blockchain through the Keychain Steem Wallet Intro To Keychain, thanks to @yabapmatt, @aggroed, @stoodkev and @nateaguila for their great work on this project.

Transaction confirmations take around 3 seconds, allowing for a responsive gaming experience compared to other Blockchains. Although confirmation times are fast, actually getting the transaction back from the Blockchain can take up to 60 seconds. In order to mitigate against cheating, we wait for these confirmations before transferring any funds after the game is complete. Without doing this it would be possible for rogue players to alter their stake values in the front end thereby cheating you out of your possible winnings. If someone is found to be cheating in a game, we will refund your stake.

Referrals

We have a referral system that pays out 10% of the game commission every time your referral wins. You can get your referral link from the [website] (https://cupz.io) by clicking on the referral menu item.

Technology

We are passionate about Blockchain technology and would like the world to benefit from the possibilities it brings, however currently we need more people involved. It is our vision through fun games like this and a number of other projects we are working on across multiple Blockchains, to get as many people involved as possible. With that in mind we have tried to design this game to be as user friendly as possible and have pragmatically chosen the current best technologies available.

In order to provide a safe and responsive gaming experience we need a server that can manage the game state whilst we wait for the trustless power of Blockchain, so we host a server app on AWS EC2 (meh!), however state is stored in a decentralised OrbitDb running on the IPFS network. The frontend application has been developed using Elm, a functional, open source javascript framework with a Haskell tilt and interaction with the Steem Blockchain is enabled by the KeyChain Chrome Extension.

With this combination of technologies we have been able to develop a financially safe and responsive game, easily accessible by newcomers to the Blockchain ecosphere.

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We hope you enjoy our game and wish you the best of luck. Feel free to join us on Discord for chat and support issues.