“What happens if you lend to someone and they don’t pay you back?”
You don’t get your money back.
Lending is a game of trust. If you trust the wrong person, you lose.
You can paper it in contracts, take collateral, threaten to deduct points. But the primary game you are playing is one of “should I trust this person?”. All the rest are the mini-games you play after you’ve lost to try and get one extra life.
Now, you might reasonably be thinking, isn’t trust counter to why we’re building DeFi? Is trustlessness not a core tenet?
Depends on where you place the trust.
A trustless protocol removes the need to trust intermediaries. Which shouldn’t be conflated with the need to remove trust from relationships.
A trusted messaging protocol is handing a note to the student sitting behind you to pass to the new exchange student you have a crush on. You have to trust they’ll pass on the message, not read it or modify it. A trustless protocol would be sliding a note in their locker.
“What happens if you message someone and they don’t message back?”… technology can’t solve that problem.
A credit protocol built to let anyone trust anyone, like Union, by nature can’t stop you from trusting someone. That’s the feature.
Let the Games Begin
A much more interesting question is what happens if you trust someone and they do pay you back. What can we build on that?
We all go through life trusting people every day, and for the most part, it works out. This is optimistic but isn’t naivety. All human civilizations were built on a foundation of local inter-community credit first, with money and professional lenders pretty recent inventions.
A significant hurdle is that “deciding who is credit worthy” is seen as this complex divination, that only the most quantitative of bankers supported by an army of data collection can do with any measure of success.
And rather than try to convince you with fancy words, we built TrustFallGa.me - an open world, multiplayer strategy game with competitive and cooperative modes, where you can try for yourself.
How to Play the Game:
- Mint the NFT to signal you’re playing. (It’s 0.01 ETH to add a bit of friction for Sybil)
- Become a Union protocol member on Arbitrum if you’re not already
- Each Round the Top 50 according to that rounds “Game” will get a vouch equal to the prize pool multiplied by their share of the points.
- Round 1’s game is “Convince players who also have the game NFT to vouch for you.” with a [$2,000 prize pool].
- Round 2 is a surprise TBA with the theme of “Money” [$3,000]
- The Finale is also a surprise building on round 1 & 2 and will have the theme of Betrayal [$5,000]
When does it begin?
- Round 1: July 29 → August 12
- Round 2: August 13 → August 27
- Final Round: August 28 → September 11
All rounds begin and end at 1620 GMT. And if you’re reading this in the future not having done round 1, 2 or it’s halfway through. Dont worry, you can join in at any time.
How to win?
TLDR: Don’t lose.
At a high-level, points will be allocated based on a reasonably fair formula that takes each round’s game activity as input, and uses a similar algorithm to what Gitcoin uses for Quadratic funding to give reasonably fair scores.
The only real rules are 1) Don’t exploit bugs in the contracts (you’ll make more $ reporting them) **2)**Points are tallied off-chain, and we reserve the right to remove any badly done Sybil attacks. **3)**Have fun with it!
Beyond that, there are no rules.
~written with ♥ by Trustfall.eth
--Mini FAQ--
How do I find other players? To make it easier for players to find each other we set up a token-gated telegram. If you have any questions, that’s also a good place to ask.
How do I get people to trust(re:vouch) for me? That is the question. Ncase.me/trust has a few good strategies. Bribery is always an option.
I’d like to report bugs or help improve the game, wheres the repo? unioncredit/trustfall
I have questions about Union protocol or am having trouble becoming a member? The best place to get Union specific questions answered is on the Union community discord.
Does this really count as a game? There’s points, prizes, and potential for meta-games, what more could you want from a game.
What’s the NFT token address? 0xafb9E64d8B84C20E21299E0468d57FCC04F14Acd
I’m a decentralized autonomous organism am i allowed to compete? of course! DAO’s, contracts, humans, robots, lawyers, are all allowed.