FREEDOM - A lottery game that supports public good

Funding Proposals Grants
1

Freedom Lottery

The immutable world lottery. FREEDOM is a decentralised, cross-border lottery game. No-one can stop FREEDOM

Please note the live testnet and demo video links at the bottom.

Proposal overview

Describe in less than 2,000 words on how this will benefit the blockchain ecosystem.

A lottery is more than just a game. It can funds things that are public goods. Although our demo is designed around supporting Ukraine, a game on Harmony could generated DAO multisig controlled funds for public goods that the blockchain and the community need. Unlike grants, the game is a sustainable means of finance because it attracts new money continuously. In addition such a game will attract more users for $ONE and the Harmony chain in general and help with adoption NFT marketplaces because of demand for secondary sales of the game NFTs.

Be specific about the goals and outcome of the proposal, with go-to-market and/or user-acquisition strategies if possible.

The five stages and tranches are a good fit for this project. We have received quotes from several auditors. For example, Certik are ready to start next week. After the audit and mainnet launch we deploy numerous forms of marketing to spread awareness about the game. This will include inviting well known community members to play it and talk about on their social media. We also have a longstanding partnership with Coinzilla for paid marketing if needed or considered strategic at the early stage. This depends on how viral we succeed in making the roll out.

What stage of the product or idea are you (and your team) at?

It is pre-audit, working testnet product with a good initial frontend.

Is it live on Harmony and/or another chain?

It is live on polygon mumbai for testing purposes.

How many active users do you currently have, or aim to acquire?

On test this is N/A. Potentially such a global game could grow to millions of users. This is the goal.

How much funding do you need?

The 5 proposal tranches fit our funding needs well. Current sprints run at a burn rate around $20,000 per month but most of the development is complete. Moving to marketing and promotion similar costs will help it reach self sustaining scale. Audit will be around $10k indicatively.

What are your milestones?

We work in sprints. The next sprint will focus on improving the frontend and increasing its stability. Social share is also a current challenge because the NFT visuals are SGVs. We will also look at native VRF on the Harmony chain as we prepare to implement this proposal.

Sprints or milestones include audit, mainnet launch, growth to 1000 users, 10,000, 100,000, 1M

What help do you need, or what gaps are there in your team?

Currently we have one gap in mathematics and data analysis. This will become increasingly important as we hone the right balance between the odds of instant and grand prices and the donation to causes. We also need a multisig that the community will trust to handle, allocate and/or administer the resources the game raises. The governance mechanisms of this DAO will need to be designed with the communities input and in a way that the community wants.

Proposal ask

$50k

$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet
$10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs
$10K after launching on our mainnet with audit
$10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion)
$10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process)

Metrics for success

Growth rate in users
Number of players holding NFT rather than burning
Secondary market usage number

External links

Demo link - https://youtu.be/D70UTZ8mWPU
Testnet MVP (polygon mumbai) - https://neo-ui-seven.vercel.app/

1 Like
2

Thanks for your proposal, it has been assigned and the team will review and respond shortly :blue_heart:

3

What is the value of holding the NFT? Will you have to purchase one in order to purchase tickets? Will their be some sort of incentive such as ticket discounts for holders?
Also, are there plans for other games of chance tied into this project? I think this is a great idea, and could add some income support for the ecosystem. I’ve had a similar idea/concept that I thought could have added some revenue for some of the DAOs, but I think there is more pressing matters at the moment.

Looking forward to hearing more. Thanks!

4

Hi Jerome0389, Thanks for asking good questions:

What is the value of holding the NFT?
The current game has about 16,000 to 1 chance of winning the grant prize. Roughly speaking the first NFT minted would cost around $1 (in $ONE) and increase to $2 around 20,000 minted. So, if you enter early its cheaper and you can even sell tickets later when the prize draw builds and double your money. Also if you have a winning ticket (instant prize of flag or rare colour) the prize is a multiple of current mint cost. So the longer you hold it the bigger your prize.

Will you have to purchase one in order to purchase tickets?
Yes, we would like to price tickets in ONE. The game would act as a gateway to Harmony and then because it is “sticky” it should keep people coming back to Harmony to play it. It also increases the use of and demand for $ONE and Harmony adoption more generally, including NFT marketplaces for reasons described above.

Will their be some sort of incentive such as ticket discounts for holders?
One of the goals of this grant is to help us achieve sustainable R&D through funding from the game itself. I think this grant will do that. Then we can build, prototype and audit new ideas such as this interesting idea. One option that is interesting is that a game could fund staking rewards for $ONE on a perpetual and ever growing basis.

1 Like
5

Thank you for the information. Sounds like a fun way to spend some one. Looking forward to seeing where you take this. Thank you!

6

Hey there, thanks for your application. A few questions:

1- As indicated in telegram, we don’t have chainlink vrf integrated. So, if that’s a requirement, then that needs to be integrated first. We do have our own native vrf on-chain, perhaps investigate the docs to see if that will work for you.

2- What other options are there other than lottery with color cards?

3- What if the user is color blind?

4- As with most games, what’s the game design that will ensure usage and the creation of a massive pot, which will then attract more entrants? I think this is key with all gambling apps - you gotta attract either the whales or a massive number of long-tail participants. So, having that game design is key and being able to execute on it.

Let me know what you think.

7

Hi Papi, here are some responses to your excellent points:

  1. VRF.
    For those reading but not familiar with vrf it stands for verifiably random factor and it is an on chain solution for randomness. In terms of our backlog we treat stories as ideas, then “explore”, then “do”. Once we learned about Harmony’s native VRF we explored this in detail and it not just very suitable to implement with our code, but it is ideal because it is native to the Harmony blockchain. In addition, this game is an excellent showcase for Harmony’s innovative VRF solution. The implementation of it fits into the first milestone of deploying the game to the Harmony testnet.

2 and 3. Other options. And color blind users.
We have thought of it! At 4’05 and 4’40 in the demo video show the two winning options of the current testnet (flag and rare colour). They both say in writing what they are and the button also says “claim” not “play”. Also, it is a game of chance not skill and color blind people can discern shades and therefore see the differences and enjoy the graphical element to some degree. It is an interesting action from this feedback that colours should be chosen that are most discernibly different to color blind people. But it is also worth highlighting the positives of colourful NFTs (because quite a small percentage of people (4-5%) are colorblind); the game is significantly better than traditional lotteries for its promotability. Users can share wins, or just a beautiful Mondrian neoplasticism NFT that they think look good, or the fact that they supported something meaningful while including the $ONE cash tag and #harmony hashtag. It provides constant and interesting advertising for the project on all socials. Everyone has seen the wordle colour blocks. This is even better because each is a Mondrian artwork in its own right. We have looked at other shapes and effects to use with games, for example, we have already coded a shape with a heesh number of 9 that looks cool because of shape moreso that colour. We want to achieve sustainability for the R&D needed to maximize the potential for innovation. Shapes can be used just as easily as colours, in fact.

  1. Scale
    They key to success is, as you point out, opportunities to win that capture interest and sustain interest while the pot is growing. The flag currently wins 2x the mint price with a probability of 0.1190643311, and rare white wins 5x with a probability of 0.0234375. The grand prize for a 6 block NFT has a probability of 0.00006251457237. One of our key team competences that a Harmony grant will help us acquire is data science so that we can hone the mix of odds for instant prizes, grand prize chances and other factors such as the good that is being done. Essentially, the fun and relatively easy win-now options bootstrap the lottery until it reaches scale. The other factor that is unique to this game and core to the innovation is the use of a bonding curve. In fact, for every NFT minted the prize to mint the next one ratchets up very slightly. Conversely, when one is burned (someone enters the game) the price notches down. The current design sees ticket cost doubling at around 16,000 players. This also means that if you mint a flag (2x prize) and hold this until there are over 16k players then your prize is actually 4x! In other words, as a ticket buyer you are in every way incentivised to share your cool looking NFT tickets so that more people play. In general, I like to think about your average DeFi trader and the amount of time they spend online waiting for a trade to fill or watching a position. If a game supported public good of their ecosystem and was a fun activity why would he/she not have a go quite regularly as a fun distraction that also gives them something interesting to talk about on twitter too. If you play the current testnet game you will see how catchy it is. It is really fun.
8

Okay, one more:

The current version sends 20% of proceeds to support Ukraine. How will the charitable part work on the Harmony instance? What options are there to involve the community to choose the next charity, or maybe the community decides they don’t want anything going to any charity. Thoughts?

9

Please keep the questions coming! They are helpful.

Firstly, with an innovative smart contract and idea like this we alway push as simple a version as possible to production, initially. Many, many more complex ideas are possible. When one game finishes another starts and it can be a smart contract with new functionality and rules, of course. Two or more games can run simultaneously too.

Lets look at three scenarios:

  1. Sustainable farm
    What if a % of the tickets money continuously topped up the rewards in a farm?

  2. Charity
    A multisig holds the funds raised. A DAO decides the key holders of the multisig and decides the charities to support. I liked Li’s idea to support developers with less opportunities and help them contribute to the web3 future. I think the community would like that too.

  3. Pure play
    0% to charity just maximising winning for players.

My thoughts are that the protocol should be communities from the outset. Our team generates ideas and new innovations and implements what the community wants using the R&D percentage from the game. They might want a game with 10M:1 chance of winning and no charity component (we have this option), or a farm for one game and then charity for the next, or any combination of these idea, or completely different ideas, or several game types running concurrently.

There is a lot we can do once a community decides to adopt such a protocol. One game’s smart contract could also begin feeding the next game’s prize pool as the size of the first game’s pool increases. In this way, when the next game starts there is already a growing prize pot. But these are not complexities for day 1!

10

What % of the pot goes to the team? I’m sure you wrote it down somewhere, so I’m being lazy and just gonna ask. This is important because if the number is not meaningful and won’t support you and your team, then the likelihood of ya’ll abandoning the app goes high. So we want this to be sustainable, and most gambling apps eventually die because the pot goes down and the team has bills to pay.

11

I guess that the question is, what does the percentage of the pot to the team need to be for a sustainable project? Or, more fundamentally can it be sustainable?

In the testnet deployment its 1.5%. But it can be set to any amount in any game that is deployed so the fair and right amount can always be decided upon. Like the 20% to charity, it is paid autonomously every time someone uses the dapp to buy a ticket. Indicatively, a million users would yield $22,500 to the team (if the average ticket is $1.5 and the % to team is 1.5%).

Lets dig into the annual costs to run it effectively:
CTO typical annual rate $150,000-250,000
Mid to senior developer Ukrainian $150,000 (yes, despite the war these are current rates for the best)
Top web3 frontend capable of handling scale, mobile etc. $120,000

Non core and part-time technical service providers include;
Server
Backend services if needed
Audit
Code review
QA
Bots and other such wizardry (discord, telegram, twitter)
DevOps

Marketing and administrative:
Marketing director: $150,000
PR costs
Paid advertising
SMM and community

I think the above is the dream team. 1 million players a week and a 1.5% fee would achieve it. There is a bare-bones team of course too, which could operate less intensively, use more full stack resources, bootstrap and manage with a monthly burn rate of $20,000 per month. With a 1.5% fee and an average ticket cost of $1.5 thats achieved with 222,222 weekly players. With a 4.5% fee and an average ticket cost of $1.5 it is achieved with an average of 10,000 daily users which is Milestone #5 of the proposal.

12

Approved for $50K Launch grant. Congratulations! :tada:

“Testnet Launch” means launching a feature-complete product on Harmony Testnet. We define feature complete to include a user interface, connection to a wallet (Metamask, Harmony ONE Chrome Extension, etc.) on Testnet, and can be tested end-to-end by at least 100 users.

Meanwhile, to prepare receiving funds, email your identification documents to kyc@harmony.one and create a Gnosis Safe MultiSig wallet at https://multisig.harmony.one and using instructions below
:arrow_right: Setup Gnosis Safe with MetaMask & 1Wallet

Checkout the Funding FAQ for further info at Harmony Funding FAQ. Please join the Harmony Grants Telegram channel and Harmony’s Discord server.

Read about our Harmony Ventures Network program if you are seeking to raise capital.

We’d love :blue_heart: to see weekly updates on this thread here, to keep the community posted on this proposal’s progress!

13

Milestone 1 submission: "$10K after launching a feature-complete product on our testnet"

How have the requirements for the first milestone been met?

  1. A feature-complete product is deployed on the Harmony testnet and available to test on https://crypty-harmony-testnet.vercel.app/
  2. A short demo video has been published on youtube and the project twitter https://twitter.com/cryptywin/status/1518906659208413184?s=20&t=oqYfW17ZA6F9ESOYQ_F9JQ
  3. Testers working! And we want some help to share the project please.
  4. My KYC documentation has been sent to kyc@harmony.one
  5. We have created a Gnosis Safe MultiSig according to requirements here Harmony Multisig Wallet

What is the team working on now?

  1. We are preparing for an audit by Certik. Price and provisional date of commencing the work are agreed. We will start after the second Harmony Launch milestone is complete.
  2. We are setting up a project Discord channel. It will feature alerts for minted NFTs and many other cool features. But primarily we need to start collaborating with other DAO members of the Harmony community and engaging them. We must form “a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with our DAOs” as the next milestone.
  3. We are promoting the milestone so that as many users as possible test the first game.
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milestone #1 funded: 0x0606ec3424729839ca920f6269ce28ec01a4e44bf913af750a2186d348db42f6

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Thank you guys, its a pleasure to work on Harmony and this is a great boost to the project. Will revert on Milestone 2 soon I hope!