By
Kseniia Klichova
April 16th, 2019
The first World Cup prediction game in the blockchain provides football fans from all over the world with a new way of fair and transparent betting based on smart contracts.
The FIFA World Cup is one of the greatest sporting events in existence. Its status and global presence creates a competition wrought with endless stress and excitement for both the players and fans.
The statistics shows that almost 3.2 billion people worldwide, roughly 46% of the world’s population, watched more than one minute of the World Cup. According to FIFA, this makes the tournament “the world’s most widely viewed sporting event.”
Considering that football is watched and played by more people than any other game on Earth, it is obvious why the World Cup online gambling is in great demand.
To put things into perspective, the developers of Cryptocup decided to create a new game, one in which you could bet on the World Cup games by using the blockchain technology. The game itself is somewhat experimental as it employs rarely used ERC721 token standard, which ensures that tokens are non-fungible and cannot be transferred in part. Cryptocup uses them to record their users’ predictions as to the course of the World Cup. The roll out of the project was set on May 21.
The game will allow users to buy any number of teams out of 32 tokens, each representing a team in the 2018 World Cup this year. The purchases are available for Ethereum (ETH) while the system of CryptoCup Smart Contract will verify all transactions occurred between users.
Notably that Coinfabrik, the developers of Jaxx and RSK wallets, have audited the project’s smart contracts and joined it in the capacity of partners to oversee the technical part of Cryptocup. Recently the project has announced Greg Colvin to join the Cryptocup team as advisor for Ethereum Foundation.
Basic rules for the game are rather simple as it all runs on your intuitive capacity. Once the user has purchased a team, it will be registered against their wallet address until someone decides to buy it from them, offering a higher price than the original cost. This is one way to make a profit playing this blockchain-based game.
Additionally you can earn money by winning some of the prize funds as the team moves ahead during the knockout stages. Each team sale adds more ETH to the prize fund. The prizes are fixed before the knockout round starts and paid out at the end of the knockout matches. The World Cup winner will grab almost 50% of the fund.
The platform’s tokens will remain tradable only for the duration of the World Cup. The project’s executives say that once the games are over, on July 23, all tokens containing winning predictions will be rewarded.
Token holders will be able to sell or buy them for a small fee, therefore making money along the way or enhancing their chances to win. After each game, the users will receive bonuses for a correct prediction. At the end of the World Cup, the number of bonus scores will determine the amount of the prize.
The model implies double volatility risks as the price of each token will be changing after every game. Still, those who know their team may actually benefit from it. Each Cryptocup token is therefore an e-ticket that cannot be stolen, feigned or altered. This, according to the developers, guarantees that this game is provably fair and completely transparent, which differs it substantially from regular sports betting.
Cryptocup tokens are far from a long-term investment, however if you are hyped about the FIFA World Cup and you are willing to bet, then check it out. To join the game, one would just have to buy and fill in the ticket-token. Over the first week of the sale, it will cost 0.045 ETH, with the price going up every subsequent week.
