Title
True Fantasy Sports – A decentralized, trustless and permissionless platform to eliminate fake participation and data manipulation in the daily fantasy sports space.
Description
Fantasy Sports is an online platform for sports enthusiasts to compete with each other by forming virtual or imaginary teams of professional athletes of a particular sport. The performance of these virtual teams is mapped to the actual performance of athletes in the real world, making fantasy sports a skill-based competition. Currently, it is a multibillion-dollar industry worldwide which hosts millions of users across many platforms and is projected to grow immensely in the next couple of years.
Despite the sheer size of this industry, its users face severe complications which the existing platforms do not seem to be addressing let alone solving. Astonishingly, most users are unknown of these issues mainly because they are shown what they should see and are left with the only option of blindly trusting the provider.
True Fantasy Sports (TFS) aims to solve these difficulties with its truly decentralized platform. We aim to set an example for the fantasy sports industry and its organisations by implementing our platform on Web3.
TFS is a visionary platform in this segment as it would allow the users to not only use its services but govern it as well, resulting in complete transparency between the provider and the consumer.
Manifesto/Vision
Our mission is to revolutionize the fantasy sports industry by creating a decentralized platform that empowers users to participate in fair and secure games. We strive to provide a transparent and engaging experience for sports fans everywhere, giving them the opportunity to showcase their knowledge and compete with others on a global scale. Our commitment to decentralized technology ensures the integrity of the games and provides a level playing field for all participants. We believe that everyone should have access to exciting and rewarding fantasy sports experiences, and it is our goal to make that a reality.
Our vision is to establish True Fantasy Sports as the standard for this segment resulting in a complete paradigm shift in the industry. Our priority is the user base and the community, the sole aspect that contributes to the success of any platform. Therefore, they should have the right to understand it inside-out. Furthermore, we want our community to actively participate in decision-making and decide what is best for the platform.
We wish to set an example for up-and-coming platforms that transparency and fair practice should have the utmost importance in order to form a resilient community.
Problem
Daily Fantasy Sports players currently put up with several complications and they are totally oblivious to it because the platform providers have complete control over what their users should see and know.
Some of the complications include involvement of bots or fake participations, contest and data manipulation. Unfortunately, it is next to difficult for users to voice their concerns since the providers generate an atrocious amount of revenue through these malpractices. Since providers end up benefiting by not addressing these issues, it is in their interest to distract their users from complaining about them.
To verify the authenticity of these claims and to assure we are not making any false claims to promote our platform, one can simply look up reviews of fantasy sports applications on public forums, for example, Play Store or AppStore to learn about these allegations
Solution
The solution to solve the above problems is simple. There should exist a platform where you have complete control over your funds and data along with the security and transparency of blockchain technology. Furthermore, it’s crucial that each of its member’s identity is verified.
A community platform that allows its users to raise disputes when needed and have the same community take a stand in resolving the conflict.
That’s what our decentralized platform on Ethereum offers, with its own DAO and Oracle. We’re also taking measures to verify user identity to ensure a fair and secure playing field for all.
With us, you’re in control of your funds, data, and destiny. Our cutting-edge blockchain technology ensures security, transparency, and fairness for all players.
It is about time that we bid farewell to centralized applications and their limitations.
Product
To tackle the challenges faced by the users, we have combined four components (DID, TFS Asserter, TFS Game Engine and TFS DAO) that enable the platform to exceed a user’s expectations:
1. Decentralized Identity:
User validation is a crucial part of our journey in making our platform as transparent and fair as possible for our users. An authentic user base is the only to make sure that there is no bogus participation in a contest. This will ensure that contest winnings are indeed credited to users and not to bots.
From our own firsthand experience and from the reviews left by users of the existing platforms on community forums, we learned that a contest opens hours before the actual sporting event begins. The contest starts to gradually fill with users submitting their teams. However, it is noticed that there would be a huge gap between the number of participants allowed in a contest compared to the number of users who have participated. All of a sudden, a few minutes before a contest closes for accepting teams, the contest rapidly fills up with random submissions and later these random submissions become the top percentile of winners. Due to this impractical behaviour, it is alleged that rapid growth in submissions is actually contributed by fake participants or bots generated by the platform itself. This provides the platforms with an extremely healthy revenue stream.
Since we are a decentralized platform and to keep ourselves truly decentralized, TFS will rely on identification methods belonging to Web3.
A user participating in the TFS ecosystem will be required to go through two specific tests: A Uniqueness Test and a Liveness Test.
The Uniqueness test will make the TFS ecosystem resistant to Sybil attacks. Whereas, the Liveness test will verify whether the user is human or not, thus eliminating the possibility of the involvement of bots.
2. TFS Asserter:
Centralized data sources are the dominant and the most popular approach currently in Web2 for any fantasy sports platform. Centralized data sources allow users to access data at light fast speeds with great accuracy.
However, since none of their data is on-chain and is entirely controlled by a single institution, a player cannot possibly raise any dispute in the event that the scores or data is defective. Furthermore, such sources are a single point of failure.
In order for the TFS game platform to satisfy its data requirements, we have decided to go ahead with the oracle approach with some changes.
According to the above process flow diagram, any user of the game platform can go ahead and post an assertion of the scorecard (points scored by each player of the contest according to the contest’s rule book based on real-life match statistics) along with a bond.
3. TFS Game Platform:
One of the issues in the current fantasy sports platform as mentioned above is fake participation and that these fake participants end up contributing vastly to the top percentile of the contest winners making their wins enormous. But how does the bot win? The answer to this question is simple – manipulation of user data.
Users are required to submit their virtual teams to the platform provider before the contest closes. There is no way of knowing how their team’s data is used. We would like to emphasize the fact that the users create their teams based on their skills and strategy.
Since one cannot know how their data is used, it is a cakewalk for platform providers to probe into a winning strategy and simply duplicating it. The players have no other option than to just blindly trust the provider.
Our game platform is aimed at eradicating data manipulation. The TFS game platform uses zero-knowledge proof and smart contracts to be a truly trustless and permissionless platform.
Users would not be required to submit their teams to us. Instead, they can submit a hash representation of their teams while participating in a contest.
Once a contest concludes, the players can generate proof of their team and scores and submit this proof to the TFS game platform. The proof will not contain any personal information of the player or their team(s).
Upon successful verification of the authenticity of this proof, the winner of the contest can go ahead and claim their rewards.
Therefore, a user will not depend on trusting the TFS platform or its developers and be assured that we are not engaging in unfair practices
4. TFS DAO:
The Decentralized Autonomous Organization protocol supports the vision of True Fantasy Sports. TFS DAO is necessary to allow the community of our users to decide on policies that the platform will function on. The TFS community will be in charge of the whole ecosystem in the future.
In order to make productive decisions in favor of the platform and the community, TFS DAO will allow its members to participate in polls and vote through a voting system.
Currently, centralized platforms can incorporate any modifications and alterations to their platform and the users have no say in it. This could significantly affect a user’s interaction with the platform. For example, platforms can make changes to their rulebook or the points system, which are the aspects one takes into consideration while forming teams for a contest to have the highest chances of winning and reaping the rewards strategically.
Therefore, unlike centralized solutions, TFS developers will not be able to implement changes as per their liking without it first being approved by the TFS community members. This ensures that the implemented modifications are truly good for the users and it also allows us to have a prior discussion regarding the changes, allowing the users to strategize accordingly.
TFS community members will be people who hold the TFS governance tokens and will have the freedom to participate in the ecosystem’s decision-making.
Validation
As of today, TFS has been attending Web3 events in person to connect with an audience who finds it easy to understand the concept. We have received positive feedback and interest from all the conversations we’ve had with multiple people. We participated in Founders Live - Hyderabad event where TFS one of the five startups to pitch at the event and we were ranked 2nd based on an audience poll.
Furthermore, we participated in a Web3 Titans event hosted by Zeeve (a Web3 infrastructure platform), in which we raised significant interest from Web3 developers who familiar with fantasy sports.
Since our platform is not yet ready for actual users to use, we currently do not have precise user feedback, however, we are confident that the reviews will be positive as the players will have access to a fair playing field.
Traction from UMA: Earlier last month, UMA (decentralized oracle) reached out to our team after we pitched our idea to their discord group. Our team connected with the UMA team to learn how to garner data from decentralized data sources. Thus, the idea of TFS Asserter was born.
Progress
TFS is currently at a development stage. During this seed stage, we are working on our game engine and asserter. The combination of these elements will allow us to produce a minimum viable product (MVP). We are putting emphasis on testing the feasibility of our business idea by focusing on product development and building a user base.
Progress can be tracked on our website and discord
Differentiation
True Fantasy Sports is a game platform unlike any other in the fantasy sports space. There are other decentralized platforms available to the players, however, those platforms are only partially decentralized and mainly to allow users to collect and trade NFTs. Although users may find it interesting, these platforms still do not solve the underlying issues.
TFS players, unlike of other platforms, will be in complete control of their funds, data and destiny. Later on, the users will also be in control of the very community that operates the game. We are the only platform that has decentralized every element that drives the game. A successful commercialization of our truly decentralized platform will also allow us to shape the future of Web3 gaming.
Team
- Karandeep Singh: Developer: 5+ exp in web3 ecosystem.
- Samirkumar Tripathy: Developer: 6+ exp in backend development for highly scalable applications.
- Sharath TR: Business Development: 3.5+ years of Business Development experience, EU grant consultant, working with web3 startups.
Grant Request $
$10,000
Funds
Use of Proceeds:
Help
- Mentorship
- Promotion
Additional Resources
- Website and Web App: https://www.truefantasysports.com
- Medium: https://truefantasysports.medium.com/
- Discord: Discord
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/TruFntsySports
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/true-fantasy-sports