Grant Application: Multi-Player Poker on SCRT

Secret Governance
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Abstract

Tortuga Labs ( https://piratelife.casino / https://dvpn.casino ) is a blockchain research laboratory focusing on leveraging smart contracts to ensure games are trustless and provably fair at an individual transaction basis. Each game in the white label casinos linked above is its own blockchain smart contract ( explorer.turtlenetwork.eu/address/3Jd3hFS5j9UXnq8giP4rC17LvZoiErb5CvF/script ).
The PRNG in each game is based on an unbiased on-chain solution for generating random numbers ( www.academia.edu/49224905/Generating_Random_Numbers_using_Blockchain_Technology_for_Gaming).
We wish to bring to SCRT a modified open source version of the PRNG implementation in a multi player poker format.

Project Description

Tortuga Labs is seeking to build a SCRT based platform for shielded gaming. Much of the development will have open-source contributions, including the PRNG implementation which can prove useful for NFT projects, gaming, or finance.

The community will be able to hook into the API to track round outcomes as well as payout sums.

Tortuga Labs have been operating mostly on the turtle.network blockchain up to this point, one of the downsides is the smart contract language is Non Turing Complete. These limitations result in problems facilitating multiplayer games, WASM on SCRT is Turing Complete and many of the games would benefit from the privacy features of the blockchain.

Team and Experience

  • Raphael - CEO

  • Draeth - Lead Advisor

  • Nigel - Game Programmer/Developer

  • Dream Tim - Marketing Advisor

  • Art - Game Management

  • Krystal - Marketing

  • Cam - Outreach

  • Robbin - Game Programmer/Developer

  • Heather - 3d Animation/Artist

  • Marius - Web Development

  • Kaks - Community Management

  • Rose - Environmental Artist/3d Animator

  • Rodrigo - 3d Animator

  • Steven - Game Tester

  • Paul - Video Production

  • Jackie - Smart Contract Development

  • Brian - Game Developer

  • Brandon - Game Developer

Deliverables & Milestones

  1. Tortuga Labs will release an open-source PRNG module in WASM.

  2. Open-source Multiplayer Poker Smart Contract

  3. Launched UI/UX

Ecosystem Value & Success Metrics

Every interaction on the platform generates a transaction which results in SCRT paid to the network validators. Each contract which involves rounds also has a game master which processes the rounds incurring fees to the network whether there are active players or not.

To track the success of the games and the gas they have burned, we will employ an open API to the community.

  • Total transactions processed and spent gas

  • Total administrative transactions ( process bets / round start / round end )

Budget

Tortuga Lab’s is requesting for $88,000 to develop and open-source a Multi-Player Poker game on SCRT. This includes open-source code bases for:

  • Front-end

  • API Back-end

  • Smart Contracts

The breakdown for the costs would be:

  • $50,000 – Development

  • $10,000 – Academic Paper

  • $10,000 – Casino Collateral

  • $10,000 - Marketing

  • $ 8,000 – Volatility buffer

Total: 14864 SCRT

About Tortuga Labs

Tortuga Lab’s mission is to build innovative gaming technologies, products and services to enhance on-chain use cases and push blockchain towards widespread adoption. We believe that gaming is one of the main keys to on-boarding new users and driving transactions on chain and utilize cutting edge technologies that we develop to enhance user experience and engagement, as well as provide ways to show them that the systems they are playing on are provably fair. We are able to do this by creating new technologies on the chain we are developing on and creating products and services that are attractive and fun for users, providing an engaging environment geared toward everyone. We also implement our own custom commit and reveal type PRNG to ensure fair randomization without the ability for users to game the system. We welcome any and all feedback on this proposal, as we are looking forward to working with the Secret Community to ramp up on-chain usage and adoption.

10 Likes
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This sounds interesting. For reference here’s a 2-player Secret Network poker game built entirely on-chain. On Secret Network getting random numbers is as easy as hashing inputs from at least 2 non colluding players, because inputs & state are private.

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A few of us had considered doing this a year ago. Back then gas was much more expensive which meant that what gets bled out of the game just for gas made it not feasible to have the small stakes games that draw the most players. And serious players generally considered that additional “rake” more than they would care to endure.
Since supernova though, gas is cheaper so that shouldn’t be a problem anymore, but I think you will find that having every action be a tx will make the game too slow (at least 6 seconds between players’ actions) to appeal to the more serious players. And because of sequence numbers, I think you would need to set it up so that a user has a different address for each table they are playing simultaneously (if you allow multi-tabling to overcome how slow playing at a single table will be). So you’ll have to make sure your flow doesn’t make funding multiple tables too much of a pain.
In general, I think you really need to consider how much of a market you will have. If it doesn’t appeal to serious players, and you are only left with new and casual players, they might play a good bit when first introduced, but then quickly lose interest

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I think that a good UI can go a long way here. 6 seconds is really not a lot.

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It would be awesome if you guys would consider the chatting feature integrated from ALTER for players.

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I second this. Being able to interact with other players would bring a lot to the table. And you wouldn’t want to strain your resources by reinventing the wheel with something that’s already built by another team as well.

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It can absolutely be considered.

We wanted to thank everyone as well for their responses on this pre-proposal, it means alot to have your time and consideration.

Our team will soon aim to have this formally proposed on-chain.

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Awesome, let me know when we could have an intro call if this gets approved.

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Just for my understanding, you are planning to submit a spending proposal? Since the title mentions a grant application I assumed you aimed to go for an ecosystem grantand were looking for community feedback.

(nothing against you going to the community pool)

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I agree, their provably fair mechanism is unnecessary on Secret Network.

Also, what is the point of making round outcomes and payout sums public? Surely that’s antithetical to the point of private contracts, and would likely de-anonymize the users.

For their use case Turing completeness isn’t a limiting factor.

A game master isn’t necessary on Secret Network, due to the inherent properties of private smart contracts.

It seems like a transparent blockchain like Polygon or Solana (non turing complete) would be much better suited to overcome the problems they’re having, as none of Secret Networks unique properties are being taken advantage of in their proposal.

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The game master is used to keep the pace of the game (i.e. invoke next round across all tables) to stop a player who is unresponsive from holding up the game.

The game master doesn’t know need to know anything, it just invokes next round starts.

SCRT smart contracts would improve the PRNG solution, as the current one does have some miner possible advantages (single block PRNG generation) that would be eliminated by the SGX computation in SCRT.

@pmuecke After seeking clarification the team will first go through Github as a grant and subsequently try a spending proposal if need be.

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@TortugaLabs I love poker, looking forward to this! I hope you get the funding you seek!

Please know that as you build out this product, our Secret Agents all over the world can help generate awareness around your news announcements, and help you test & debug the game. You can reach me on Discord SecretSkrillah | WhisperNode :zipper_mouth_face:#4321 or the team in the #awareness channel on our server to leverage the power of the Secret Agents. :male_detective::black_joker:

1 Like
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Voting against as someone who is 10 years into online poker industry.

  • poker games with on-chain rng haven’t met any demand so far. Virtue Poker is the main reference, they had Phil Ivey as a brand face, on-chain provably fair RNG but it turned out they solved a problem that didn’t exist. You can check their traffic now. Centralized certified RNG do they work.

  • Provided websites by the team have very poor UX/UI. I would doubt they can deliver a good product

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The on-chain proposal requires clarification

The title of this thread is called ‘grant application’.

On multiple occasions in Discord chat you have communicated to pursue a grant.

Why has this been changed to an on-chain community pool funding request?
Community pool IS NOT grant application.

Also, in order for the community pool to fund a gambling application, it has been made clear (in the CCBL) that the regulatory framework for gambling applications needs to be reviewed in the country where you wish to register your business. So far (if I’m not mistaken) this regulatory framework has not been provided.

If the above can’t be clarified, Domerium Labs will have to vote ‘No’

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SCRT Labs has also seemed to indicate they were not approached for a grant despite the proposal stating so. We have concerns as well and have voted No.

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Regarding the concern there are not enough players for Poker in SCRT.Network, there is an established player base through the existing platforms who wishes to have a poker game and this would address that for our users as well who would populate the game. Additionally, we would be able to provide custom iterations after the initial contribution (i.e. a version of Poker which accepts SCRT wrapped XMR). We have seen a consistent demand from our current user base for multi player poker, and from non-players that have visited the existing platforms.

So far as the UI is concerned, we are more than happy to contract from professional UI designers for the production iteration.

As new participants of the network, we did our best to reference policy guidelines from proposals on chain, and recently there was a code of conduct that was voted on and passed, to our understanding it suggested that before you formally apply for a grant or a funding proposal, that you put a draft of it into the community forums for discussion and review. Understandably, because we’re new, we had difficulty distinguishing between the two items. Our intention was that we were coming to the network to build a product, referencing our ability to deliver similar smart-contract based solutions. With regards to the regulatory framework for gambling applications, we are currently operating within applicable framework of laws and regulations of Lagos, Nigeria.

We are thankful for the opportunity and the participation of the community thus far. We will be in the meeting tomorrow (Wednesday) and will be available to answer any and all questions and concerns, and will hopefully be able to find a smart-contract solution that the community is happy for us to develop.

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And I’m afraid you continue to misinterpret. A Grant application needs to be submitted on GitHub as an issue. Your spend proposal is accessing a small pool of about $4m in community funds, to access the $400m pool intended for building applications you HAVE to use GitHub.

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Digiline Validator voted NO on proposal #88.

We agree with all concerns mentioned by others and would like to add the following reasons:

  • The cost and team breakdown is peculiar; An academic paper is not necessary, for example
  • A PRNG algorithm is not needed, many other contracts already use a PRNG algorithm, and this likely wouldn’t add any new value to the network

With that said, it’s great to see this first effort by the Tortuga team. Digiline encourages your team to return to the drawing board and come back with all concerns addressed.

Alternatively, and given Tortuga’s limited experience with Secret, your team could look into submitting a different proposal of smaller scope.

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Hey all, thank you so much for all of the feedback given thus far. We would like to continue this discussion at our newly created thread, located here: https://forum.scrt.network/t/tortuga-labs-game-development-on-secret/

Also, @gino can you provide us a github link to some of the existing contracts that use their own PRNG algo? We would like to conduct a study that compares the output of the various solutions, as well as ours, to check the number spread for potential bias over a large dataset.

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These repos all use ChaChaRng: