Cardano After Dark - Hold'em poker

Create a decentralised poker-platform where players can play for cryptocurrencies directly from their wallets with minimum fees

UI/UX, Plutus, Project-management, Software Development, DevOps, Cardano Architecture & Design Developer Professional student at Emurgo

What is it all about?

Building an Online Poker Dapp will give Poker-players a decentralised alternative to play on the Cardano Network. In addition, this would be a creative experiment in terms of implementing real-world solutions tackling common DeFi problems with a different approach. For instance:

• secure protocols without trusted intermediaries (ZK)
• financial rewards and penalties enforcements (following rules)
• disaster-prevention rules (responsible gambling)
• responsible tokenomics (part of the income shall be destined to addiction prevention)

Our aim is to build a real-world Poker Dapp, that can tackle the above problems.

While there are other Poker-projects out there we are going to implement our solution with regards to the IOG (Former IOHK) co-sponsored Paper [1]"Kaleidoscope" to the paper [2]"Royale"* as well as [3]"21 - Bringing down the Complexity"*

This will not just get IOGs papers in a real Environment but will also bring lower cost to Pokerplayers and raise awareness for Cardano within the gaming-community. Our implementation will be open source and well documented which means it can be reused and built upon by everyone in the Cardano eco-system. In addition our hope is to benefit from an ecosystem, filled with professionals in mathematics, game theory and exploitation.

Poker could be just the beginning, creating a poker-platform based on these papers we keep other card-games in mind for easier integration in further iterations while others could use our model to build their own card-games or find other usecases in other Cardano-markets for this model!

Within the context of this proposal we will create Testnet-player-NFTs to incentivize and have an immutable record of their participation and who knows what else we can bring to the community once we have a plattform to implement these, Avatar-NFTs, open-source-contributers, DIDs.

How does success look like?

A proof of concept/MVP on the Cardano Testnet

Users who own ADA can play the game using real tokens

rules should be applied correctly (e.g. a user leaving midgame loses part of his stake)

Responsible game actions shall be applied (e.g. prevent addictive behaviors, by alerting or incentivising game-stops)

A mechanism for social compensation shall be applied.

The Plan: Roadmap and Milestones

While working in a Lean and Iterative Methodologie, we think these Milestones can be met.

First three months:

Implement part of the smart contract, including the below bullet points

• Wallet integration
• Smart contract
• Frontend
• Backend

Extensive documentation on what we do and on the process.

Part of analytic documentation incl. flowchart, algorithm, contract.

first six months:

go from development to public testnet

publish articles about what we do

open source the project

MVP finished

ready for auditing

Team

• Seomon - Cohort F6, CA, IT consultant
  https://github.com/Seomon4u

• Psuzzi - Fullstack Engineer, Banking, Automotive, SW Modeling
  https://github.com/psuzzi

• David Baxter - Front end Engineer and Founder of Beanchain Coffee
  https://www.linkedin.com/in/baxweb

• Cem Karaca - Cardano Architecture & Design Developer Professional Student @Emurgo. fintech data center owner, MFC/C++ developer, cyber security professional. https://www.linkedin.com/in/ckaraca/
  https://github.com/ckaraca

• Cagkan - Backend Engineer. Experience in Python, PostgreSQL and a bit of HTML&CSS.

• Jude Ben - 9 years+ Software Development , Plutus Smart Contract Development , Cloud and Infrastructure Engineer https://www.linkedin.com/in/judeebene/

• Thomas - Theoretical physicist and mathematician
  https://nl.linkedin.com/in/thomas-vellekoop-1a622119a

• Steve Lockhart - Community builder, decentralization advocate, arborist, dog owner.

• Nori Nishigawa - 
  https://github.com/xeeban

• Shannon Baxter - UI/UX Designer, Information Architect, Management
  https://www.sbax.design/

Budget Breakdown

• Programming: 450 hours 50$ = 22.500 $
• Project Management: 120 hours * 50$ = 6.000 $
• Marketing: 80 hours * 50$ = 4.000 $
• Documentation: 50 hours 50$ = 2.500 $
• Community and partners = 5.000 $

Success metrics

Userbase:

• Do we have enough initial users/testers? (100+ users)
• How many rounds have been played (2000+ rounds)
• How many transactions are being made? (250+ transactions)

Functionality:

• The Poker application is complete and functional
• We use funds from the connected wallet
• If signs transactions that are directly sent on chain
• It applies the rules of the game and enforces penalties
• Reusability: can you use the application as a template for building similar applications?

Usability: 

• The application shall be easy to use and intuitive

Transparency: 

• Smart contract backend and (open source architecture) makes the system transparent.

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Links:

• Check out our Github
  https://github.com/Cardano-After-Dark/
• check out our initial idea for an architecture
  https://github.com/Cardano-After-Dark/co-ordination/blob/main/docs/architecture.md
• Check out our ideation
  https://miro.com/app/board/o9J_lhLk_UY=/?invite_link_id=544237046605 ()
• Join our community and talk to us!
  https://discord.gg/VwxRdEBwBE

References:

• [1] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/kaleidoscopean-efficient-poker-protocol-with-payment-distribution-and-penalty-enforcement/
• [2] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/royalea-framework-for-universally-composable-cardgames-with-financial-rewards-and-penalties-enforcement/
• [3] https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/21bringing-down-the-complexityfast-composable-protocols-for-card-games-without-secret-state/