Footium: Rarible Ecosystem Integration Proposal

Note From Rarible Team: Although the following proposal originally included Phase 1 & 2, we are only considering Phase 1 at this time.

Link to the Forum Post: https://gov.rarible.com/t/grant-application-footium-rarible-ecosystem-integration/16076

TLDR

Footium is an NFT 2.0 football (soccer) management game looking to integrate with the Rarible protocol, Rarible would serve as an additional storefront for our in-game assets (in-combination with our native marketplace). Footium has immense potential, tapping into one of the largest markets in gaming, while being the only blockchain based football game to provide serious gameplay with awesome collectibles. At the moment, our native marketplace is primitive, we are integrating with Rarible to facilitate wider interoperability with the NFT ecosystem.

Problem / Opportunity

What problem or opportunity are you looking to solve?

We have noticed a lack of engaging gameplay in the NFT space, particularly in football games. SoRare has done well with its licensed digital football collectibles, however, its gameplay amounts to little more than speculation. Footium combines the gameplay of great football management games like Football Manager with NFTs and DeFi attributes.

A problem at the moment within Footium is the overhead of developing our own custom NFT marketplace. Whilst our native transfer market has a functional buying and bidding system (demoed at the end), it is tethered to the game, we understand that part of the value NFTs provide are owners’ capacity to seamlessly exchange their assets on different platforms.

Rarible is the perfect platform to integrate with because it provides a protocol for us to integrate with our application as well as its own marketplace which facilitates wider adoption of Footium collectibles in the NFT ecosystem.

We wish to give users the freedom to list assets on both marketplaces, our own and Rarible’s simultaneously, via the Rarible protocol.

Funding Milestones and Payments

We have currently delivered on implementing our own native marketplace,

High level milestones & payments:

• Phase 1: Main integration with the Rarible protocol 15/08/2021
  • Each club will have its own page with name, owner, price, bids, transfer history, and link to Rarible
  • Each player will have its own page with name, owner, price, bids, transfer history, and link to Rarible
  • The user will be able to buy, sell, place a bid, accept a bid through the Footium UI
  • By using Rarible, the user will also be able to list a player/club for a sale and place bids without any transaction fees.
  • $10,000USD

See technical appendix for more details.

Payments will be made to the following Ethereum address:

0xb929Cc17b31dFC745CC8d9c9F5249bF3b4bEECEa

We consider ourselves independent contractors of the Rarible DAO and will report taxes accordingly. Forms W8-BEN and W9 will be filled out accordingly before funds get distributed to our team.

Use of funds

Funds will be used to pay ourselves whilst working on the integration into the Rarible protocol, plus to pay for the time spent accommodating for future updates to the protocol.

Business Model

We have a token model that will provide our company’s treasury in the short-medium term, there should be no need for the Rarible DAO to provide subsequent grants.

The crux of the business model is predicated on the importance of staking in the game’s own ecosystem. We have Club NFTs which hold a more general club object and an academy object.

The Academy object can be conceptualised as an NFT farm, where the quality of the farm’s yield is an increasing function of the number of tokens staked, the quality of the yield corresponding to players’ valuable attributes.

The Club object is effectively the interface between the user and the underlying game, this interface can be understood in terms of the quality of the overall team put forward by the club to play against the other teams of the league. Here, a team’s overall rating benefits from a multiplier, as an increasing function of the amount of tokens staked.

We would also wish to use Rarible’s royalties capabilities, to garner transaction fees from trade as well as implementing transaction fees for the trade that occurs on our platform.

Team Members

• Jordan Lord: Lead Developer. Project Lead & Software Engineer. He is currently a full-time developer at Netcraft, a cybersecurity company. His Linkedin profile is here.
• James O’Leary: Smart Contract Developer & Business Lead. He is currently an Economics and Management student at the University of Oxford. His Linkedin profile is here.

We’ve been working together on this project as a team for just over 10 months, having come together during the Encode Spark Hackathon in Summer 2020. Subsequently, we completed the Algorand pre-accelerator, since these more structured building schedules we have maintained a steady pace of work and now wish to take the project to another level.

The contact person for this project will be Jordan Lord. His contact information is jordanlord999@gmail.com and his Discord handle is trusting_chandrasekhar #1581.

Accountability

Our project will attend weekly community calls, and provide updates on our milestones as we make progress. In the event that we can’t fulfill our commitment, funds will be returned to Rarible DAO. We will also work with community members to ensure updates are distributed through the Rarible communication channels.

Why should Rarible DAO fund this?

Football, and sports games more generally, have proven their worth in the NFT space. SoRare’s native marketplace generates significant transaction volume, not far after Rarible. When Footium gains traction, it would likely generate similar transaction volumes to SoRare, exposing Footium’s user base to NFTs more widely would benefit Rarible and the wider NFT ecosystem more generally.

We believe it would be mutually beneficial for Rarible to become a key stakeholder in our protocol, and as a matter of aligning our incentives we wish to give the Rarible DAO a number of tokens. The number of tokens corresponding to the grant’s value with respect to our valuation.

Useful Links & Media

As mentioned earlier, we have a functioning market of our own, demoed below.

Demo of selling: https://www.loom.com/share/e2ef3038eda3416a85a66adae53e7049?sharedAppSource=personal_library

Demo of Buying : https://www.loom.com/share/d11fba1a540e4607919f8e1b3c967b76?sharedAppSource=personal_library

Demo of Bidding: https://www.loom.com/share/5b6a1f3eefe44cfb867a4526f43022ba?sharedAppSource=personal_library

Technical Appendix

Milestone technical details:

• Phase 1: Main integration with the Rarible protocol 15/08/2021
  • Update the Footium API to read/proxy to the Rarible protocol when working with market/order state
    • Flow: User calls Footium API to get current market state for an NFT, Footium API then calls the Rarible API, based on the result from the Rarible API it will update the Footium game state, then return the correct part of the Footium game state.
    • The above prevents multiple calls to the Rarible API, return game state if the last request to Rarible API was recent.
  • Tweak Footium buy/sell UI to be consistent with data from Rarible and user flow with Rarible
  • Update placing a bid transaction to work with the Rarible protocol.
    • First it will approve spending of the asset to the Rarible protocol
    • Then it will sign the order data object.
    • Finally it will post the order data object to the Rarible API.
    • The bid will now appear on the Footium UI.
  • Update selling an NFT.
    • Firstly, approve spending of the NFT to the Rarible protocol.
    • Then sign the sell order data object.
    • Finally, post the sell order to the Rarible protocol.
  • Update accepting a bid or buying.
    • Firstly, approve spending of the asset to the Rarible protocol.
    • Then sign the transaction and post via standard eth API (web3).
  • Add club buying/selling/bidding
    • This is currently not implemented in Footium.
  • Implement the correct transition of parent club when buying/selling a player.
    • (Not sure how to do this yet, will this require passing metadata to the Rarible protocol? Then handling metadata on transaction to correctly reassign parent club).
    • Should the owner of a player always be the Footium FootballClub contract?
    • Therefore we should artificially change ERC-721 so that the user who is able to transact is always the owner of the parent club and that can never be changed by the user.
  • Convert player to ERC-721 standard
    • Currently this is not implemented due to the nature of player belonging to a club but the club owner having the power to transfer the player.
  • Add a feature flag for being able to swap usage of Rarible protocol with the in-built Footium contracts
    • This will influence the API behaviour.
    • And it will influence the front-end transaction signing/posting behaviour.
  • $10,000USD