Rising from its ashes, after countless tries shredded by pain and decorated with tears, here comes your favorite platform back on the scene again, JustBet.
TL;DR: It’s been a long time since we last shared anything here in this very blog. We have had a rollercoaster of a ride over the past few years, through coming up with the idea of our beloved project at very similar times to what we are in now, to a full blown bull market and back to where we are. The bear market, once again, has regenerated the ape and the degen in us. We have rebooted everything a while ago in the background, and now we have everything we need to finally roll something we can blindly ape into ourselves. We have the team, we have the speed (thanks to Arbitrum), we have the motivation.
The snapshot of previous token holders for migration will happen on the 28th of November, Monday.
When we first came up with the idea of JustBet, we wanted to build an autonomous business model that can actually benefit from being on-chain. Having witnessed so many ideas that didn’t really utilize nor need the immutability and publicly verifiable ledger blockchain has to offer the previous bull market, we were already very clear with our approach. However, we didn’t yet have the technology, nor experience, nor the business model we needed. These shortcomes had us fail two times.
In this cycle, a lot of innovative technologies and models have emerged. Let us go over them in a brief manner, and explain what gave us inspiration and motivation to believe that the third time, is in fact, is the charm.
The emergence of L2s: The more we tried to develop JustBet outside of EVM, which we believe has the cleanest open source library of all — Solidity -, the more we had troubles implementing our model. It was a nightmare to try to build on Tron, with countless node problems, and non-existing code libraries. We needed Solidity, we needed the speed and low gas fees offered by Layers 2s.
One of the main challenges we faced trying to build an on-chain, autonomous casino was the user experience. Asking users to pay more transaction fees than their actual bet amount was definitely a no-go. On top of this, gamblers are used to games that have shiny animations, and near-instant settlements on centralized platforms. A Layer 2 like Arbitrum, provides us near instant settlements, which only leaves us to work with the UX on the frontend. Plus, the transaction costs are a fraction of the minimum bet, which means we can onboard everyone from small gamblers, to bots, to large bettors.
Alternative, faster VRFs: As you may know, every game needs a random number to be provably fair. This is the backbone of a healthy relationship between the bankroll and the player. While having no such solution on Tron, and relying on block hash that crippled our security, Chainlink’s VRF (Verifiable Random Function) gave us a breather. It provided us with a random number that we can use in almost any casino game.
However, even though we had Chainlink’s VRF on our second go, it was still slow and provided a boring user experience. It is still slow to this date, and requires three Ethereum mainnet blocks. With Layer 2s being established this year, we now have access to VRF that is compatible with the speed of Arbitrum. This gives us a chance to settle a bet in a few seconds, and provide a centralized casino like experience on the frontend to the user, without giving away any security backdoors.
DeFi Summer: Every casino needs a bankroll that pays the winners, and receives (thus profiting) the losses. Our previous models couldn’t solve this problem. This was a large strain, as we couldn’t previously figure out a way to fund the bankroll, keep it healthy, and distribute profits to the WINR holders at the same time. Each time we tried, it either ended up as us getting rekt of our funds on the bankroll, or simply not figuring out how much to distribute to those who stake their WINRs.
The summer of DeFi however, gave us a few good ideas on how we can actively manage a bankroll without jeopardizing the continuity of the betting flow. The answer was liquidity pools. We have now revamped our whole take on the bankroll, and we created a separate liquidity pool much like popular on-chain derivatives exchanges such as GMX. This creates a whole separate layer on our smart contract framework, which basically rewards users for providing the liquidity the bankroll needs, in exchange for hefty APYs generated by losses of the gamblers.
Hence, #realyield.
Improved Tokenomics: Emissions, ah dear, sweet emissions. This was something that we screwed up with at the very beginning of our V1. Our emission model was not based on the expected payout, rather it was based on the bet amount which meant minting a lot of tokens for a large bet with minimal risk, that provided no real yield to the bankroll. We have completely changed our emission model. Bets will now be minting vWINRs, otherwise known as vested WINRs, that could be staked for a certain timeframe to receive real yield in ETH, and in future USDC. vWINRs can be converted to actual WINRs after the staking period ends, or with a penalty before the end of the period.
On of this, we couldn’t clearly define what WINR tokens were in terms of utility. Being through a couple of bear markets, we were already over the governance model, but we couldn’t still create a meaningful supply and demand model. Now we know what utility WINR has, with a clear purpose. It’s a cashback token. Just like how centralized casinos, WINR tokens are a cashback of every bet, that are now entitled to receive a portion of each and every bet, until the end of the day. This model makes sure the liquidity pool and its providers are not hurt by large sums of profits being allocated to token holders, but at the same time makes sure WINR stakers get a small fraction of every bet, regardless of the outcome of the bet itself.
Hence, #cashback.
Moving Forward
We are in the process of developing the games and testing our new futures on our closed alpha. We will soon release an incentivized community testnet while we improve our UX with the feedback, and audits of our smart contracts are complete. Until we release our mainnet, we will be releasing a series of articles on each point we have briefly explained above. The articles will cover our exact implementation of the #realyield strategy, improved and revamped tokenomics including the transition model for existing holders, and most importantly the brand new product framework alongside exciting fresh games.
We thank everyone who has stuck with us, and look forward to having you on our open beta.
Yours truly,
JustBet Team
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