Add ETH as a Gameplay Option

Introduction:

I propose adding ETH as a game currency for blackjack and roulette in the Decentral Games casino.

Proposal:

ETH is a coin that nearly every single Ethereum wallet has. People use it every day to pay gas fees. A growing narrative within the Ethereum community is that “ETH is ultrasound money”. It is the largest coin within the Ethereum ecosystem by far. Most users will have some amount of ETH in their wallets that can be used for gaming. This is a currency that the vast majority of users will not have to convert into in order to be able to gamble. Offering a currency that requires no conversion (because they already own it) decreases deposit friction and should lead to more deposits and higher revenue for the DG treasury.

Some statistics (from Coingecko.com/tether.to on April 8, 2021):

Market cap of MANA = $1.3 billion. Market cap of DAI = $3.1 billion. Market cap of USDT (on Ethereum) = $22.5 billion. Market cap of ETH = $240 billion.

When targeting users that are not interested in converting their coins to be able to deposit on Decentral Games, we are increasing the total addressable market (TAM) from $26.9 billion in value to $266.9 billion in value. It is also a coin that is in almost everyone’s wallet and that they are used to spending for gas fees. Increasing the TAM by 10x with the most popular coin in the Ethereum ecosystem is a high-value proposition that will improve the UX and has a high probability of increasing revenue.

Execution:

If implemented, this is how I propose it to be done.

The team will deposit 50 ETH of their own money that will be donated to the Gameplay portion of the treasury to back bets. This way we will not have to move ETH from any other part of the treasury to fund this proposal. I spoke to the team directly and they provided authorization for this donation.

The UI will appear as follows. There will be four bet sizes for roulette and blackjack. These sizes will be depicted as fractions because they look cleaner than decimals (for example 0.001 ETH does not look good). The sizes are: 1/1000, 1/100, 1/10, and 1. Those sizes translated to USD (at the time of this writing) = $2.10, $21, $210, and $2100. An oracle will be used to display the real-time USD value of each of those four bet sizes (underneath the chips, so the user does not have to do any math to calculate the USD value of how much he/she is betting). So for the bet sizes, the ETH amount will remain constant (1/1000, 1/100, 1/10, and 1) but the USD value will continuously change. If the ETH in the Gameplay portion of the treasury starts to get low, the team will add more ETH as needed.

Conclusion:

In closing, adding ETH as a game currency increases our TAM by 10x, increases the likelihood a user has an available currency to play with that requires no conversion, and is backed by a 50 ETH donation from the DG team to the DG treasury. Vote “Yes” to approve this proposal.