SP8DE THE GAME OF CHANCE CHANGED A DECENTRALIZED PLATFORM FOR GAMING DAPPS

Introduction

Welcome to Spade, a blockchain-based platform capable of supplying unbiased public randomness for developing and running distributed casino applications. Spade is designed to suit the purposes of all the actors comprising the online casino landscape and as such represents the new breed of digital institutions, a distributed intermediary.

The spark that lit this project and continues to inspire us now, is that early blockchain and Bitcoin casinos simply didn’t get it right. The Blockchain community was younger and wilder, ideals of distributed freedom were burning brighter… still, early adopters who applied blockchain technology to gambling promoted the wrong ideals; those undermining the image of decentralized casinos. Instead of promoting transparency and cost efficiency that characterize blockchain technology, they promoted anonymity and cyber anarchy. Instead of making the casino for everyone, they kept it to themselves.
By no means are we here to judge. Instead, we are here to change. We do not say that old ways are bad, but can prove that new ones are better. We hold faith in the decentralized future and appreciate the charm of gambling. We soon realized that there is only a fragile wall of glass between the old centralized gambling and the future global distributed casino. This is it, a simple yet captivating idea. The future is here: we can run a zero-house edge decentralized casino with close-to-zero transaction fees and provably fair random numbers feeding entropy into a myriad of Smart-Contract-based open source casino applications that can be developed by anyone who has a worthy idea by means of state-of-the art application-specific as well general-purpose programming languages. “We can” was the silent voice of the idea. Now it is the marching echo of “we do”.

As it frequently happens, technological progress made a massive leap forward that went unnoticed by the majority of human kind: people still prefer the traditional narrow-minded and boring online casinos that set draconian house edges and cannot be proven fair. Once again, no one has the right to judge: it is just an existential business need, produced by a dilapidated business model and an inch of greed.

Worse than this, however, is that even the enlightened ones, those chosen to witness the dawn of the distributed world have noticed a perfect fit between distributed consensus protocols and gambling applications, have synthesized them and… nothing. Some of these projects got infamous due to money laundering accusations, some have spoiled the beauty of the idea by running centralized online casinos and simply allowing for cryptocurrency deposits, others got their moments of fame during TGAs, today, however, few can recall even the names of these projects. Of course, there are some notable exceptions to this rule, but while succeeding locally all these projects have failed to create awareness. None of them has broadcasted the essential message: “There is no glass wall; the future of gambling is now; we are better in every single quantifiable aspect; if quantifiable is not enough, we also have the powerful idea of the distributed future, while those who are stuck in the past have only a couple of servers and an unaudited poker protocol”.
We will do what no one has done before.
Spade is a blockchain-based platform for developing distributed gambling applications. As a platform for gambling applications with self-respect, we are equipped with the protocol for generating fresh unbiased public randomness. As a team with some aspirations we have it provably fair and completely decentralized. We feel that it is important to be true to the spirit of the venture we embark upon: if blockchain is the universal and undisputed source of truth then it should also be the broadcast channel for randomness. We think that single points of failure should be perceived by anyone as just a relic of the past. This feature, while setting us aside most starkly, is only a part of what we have to offer in terms of technological.

WHAT IS SP8DE

Sp8de is a protocol for blockchain-based platform with multiple features that are essential for the growing blockchain gambling industry and whose solid implementation is lacking in any of the currently existing projects in this space.

Vision SP8DE

In the European Union the online gambling industry grew nearly 19% from the first half of 2015 until the first half of 2016. The casino industry in particular generated over US$2 billion in revenues during this period. It is expected that until 2020 this number will reach US$2.25 billion per year representing about 12.5% revenue growth [1]. In the US for the period 2015 until 2016 online casino revenues increased by 24.4% and are expected to reach US$4 billion by 2020 [2]. The EU and the US are just a small part of the worldwide casino industry. Globally, the projections of the online casino show that for the period 2017–2025 the market will experience growth of about 130% reaching US$97 billion with cumulative annual growth rate of nearly 11%. Currently over 6 million adults are officially participating in gambling activities around the world with projections of reaching 10 million by 2020 [3].

Since inception, the blockchain technology was the subject of close attention by gambling enthusiasts. Recent news from The Merkle [4] show how popular online Bitcoin betting has become. In aggregate the wagers put on online Bitcoin casinos in February 2017 have reached nearly 3 Bitcoin per minute. The price of Bitcoin at the end of February was about US$1,200 while now it is US$5,900 (approximately 292% growth) which means that as of today almost US$715 million worth of Bitcoin was gambled in February alone.

The Blockchain and the Casino

In what follows we describe a protocol for decentralized blockchain platform for developing casino applications with multiple unique features whose solid implementation is lacking in any of the currently existing projects in this space. The concept of decentralized consensus that lies at the heart of blockchain is based on the smart application of cryptography and game-theory. Combined, they create the economics of trust and hold immense potential for revolutionizing many classic industries.

This backbone of blockchain technology renders it an obvious candidate to consider in developing online gambling applications as, arguably, trust considerations and the need for transparency are — and always used to be — two major cornerstones of the gambling industry [6], [7], [8], [9]. In particular, blockchain has the potential to provide transparency to all transactions, drastically reduce the house edge, nearly eliminate transaction costs, ensure anonymity of participants and ultimately, create the trust among players and other industry participants. This rapidly evolving technological stack offers immense potential for improvements in the online gambling space, however, it also carries multiple new pitfalls that are scarcely (if at all) researched and poorly understood. To understand the benefits the blockchain brings, one needs to delve deep in the economics of casinos (the institutional viewpoint). Appreciating the challenges requires an overview of the mechanics of the blockchain technology.

The Mechanics of Spade
Spade is the new-generation blockchain-based gaming platform aimed at all the participants of contemporary casino ecosystem. We call it “new-generation” as Spade satisfies all the aforementioned conditions of a ‘proper’ blockchain casino. We build Spade on top of the blockchain called Cardano. The Cardano project itself is a monumental work that embraced the best practices and most far reaching innovations in the area of cryptocurrencies and packed them into a single state-of-art system. It is being developed and maintained by a large team comprised solely of PhDs in the field of programming and cryptography, and experienced engineers.
In what follows we will illustrate how Spade provides an environment for the design of gambling applications which are characterized with:
Close-to-absent transaction fees and Proof-of-Stake powered scalability that is beyond the reach of any other on-chain casino protocol currently in existence;

A mechanism to generate decentralized provenly uniform randomness at arbitrary time-spans;
Provides rich Smart Contract functionality that allows for creativity in game design that is bounded solely by the fantasy of the developer (and the demand for the resulting product of course);
Fairness of the outcome is essential for gambling; it is the core.
Spade utilizes Cardano to design its ecosystem and thereby solves the problems normally associated with the on-chain casinos described above. Here is how:
Transaction fees and scalability: the size of transaction fees is normally a function of the degree to which a given distributed system scales. Scalability can be defined as the relation between system resources and the number of nodes. Scalable systems gain in efficiency as new nodes join the network: BitTorrent and IOTA protocols are two prominent examples. Proof-of-Work based blockchain systems do not scale by construction: indeed, maintaining a common ledger implies every node possessing a full copy of this ledger. Without this condition, the security — most important property of such systems — is compromised. Therefore, there is no gain in efficiency when a new node joins the network. Ouroboros is a Proof-of-Stake protocol, meaning that at any given time, a trusted set of nodes maintain the integrity of the system. This protocol was shown in an experimental setting to be resistant to a handful of attacks that are known to plague other systems and are directly relevant to gambling protocols.
Random number generation: finally, Ouroboros, the POS protocol underlying Cardano blockchain in its workings fully relies upon generating unbiased (i.e. uniformly distributed) entropy. The beauty of the idea is that the blockchain itself serves as a broadcast channel: the uniform randomness is generated on-chain! For us, this is the crucial point, so let’s elaborate on it further.
POS systems are heavily dependent on the ability to generate good-quality randomness “to inject pure entropy into the system”. Without it, the integrity of the protocol can be interrupted. This stems from the fact that if there is a way to manipulate the process of selecting an agent who is chosen to validate the next block, an adversary can bias the election process. This is the root of the infamous “Nothing-at-Stake” problem and invalidates the whole concept of POS-based distributed consensus protocols. Apart from provably random number generation, another pre-condition for the plausibility of POS protocols is that these numbers are actually delivered to everyone participating in the protocol. In other words, the delivery of uniform randomness has to be guaranteed on the protocol level. Hence,
to be a valid concept, especially from a formal academic viewpoint, Ouroboros must have a mechanism for generating and broadcasting “good” randomness. Furthermore, to be scalable, the generation and verification processes must be computationally inexpensive.
Ouroboros solves these problems by embracing two well-known protocols from the field of distributed consensus: coin-tossing application of commitment schemes and verifiable secret sharing. Blending these two together produces a miracle: it creates a protocol for creating unbiased public randomness in a distributed adversarial setting with guaranteed output delivery. In layman terms, this means that Ouroboros:
a. Generates provably random numbers;
b. Guarantees that everyone will get them. Unchanged.
We will touch upon the topic of randomness again in the technical deep-dive below.
Apart from providing elegant solutions to the existential problems of on-chain casino protocols, Cardano offers a rich toolbox for solving several less critical issues:
Flexible and finance application-tailored scripting language: those who have experience with the Bitcoin scripting language know how draconian and inflexible it is, those who spent thousands of hours grinding through Solidity (the Ethereum scripting language), know how quickly it might become overly complex. Rigidity limits the number of applications; complexity limits the set of actors who are capable to work with the language and introduces larger scope for unintended errors and unnoticed bugs. To create a truly universal platform where those with bright ideas can compete for their share in the overall pie, one needs a simpler language whereby, simplicity would not come at the expense of the scope of application. Plutus is a general purpose Smart Contract language developed by IOHK and implemented in Cardano.
The core idea is that any type of financial transaction can be decomposed into simpler ones. Therefore, all the wide variety of complex financial instruments is comprised of a much smaller set of “foundational elements” that create the entire transactional logic. Cardano is designed by matters of code and is set to follow best practices; its scripting language is tailored for financial applications: security and execution can be “extremely well understood”.
With a certain degree of abstraction, one can observe strong parallels between any financial derivative and most of the gambling applications: in essence these are just contracts between one or more parties where outcome is conditioned, in part, on a realization of a random variable. This leads us to conclude that Plutus is the best of kind natural fit for writing casino applications.
Cardano is scalable, secure, and complex yet elegant. The major takeaway is that designing a successful POS protocol requires solving the same problems that constrain the creation of provably fair on-chain casinos. With Cardano as a backbone, Spade is set to become the best of its kind.
Our claims don’t require you to blindly trust us: all the results we rely on are proven with academic rigor and can be accessed by anyone on the ever-growing library of academic papers maintained by the IOHK foundation. Our competitors can appeal to the crowd stating that their protocol is unique, efficient and practically difficult to manipulate. Believing this implies having faith in their team: all the existing projects are either work-inprogress or completed, but centralized. All the results we rely upon are established with mathematical rigor and academic formalism by those for whom developing cryptography as a science is a profession, and state of the art code is an everyday tool.

Token Utility

Software license
Getting access to the universe of applications just requires you to own the native token of our system, SPX.

Gaming Chip
Betting within Sp8de ecosystem is done only using SPX. By owning SPX, you share a part in protocol’s success.

Royalties
SPX is used to reward the developers fairly on the protocol level.

TOKENS DISTRIBUTION

Sale

The entire token distribution will be 8,888,888,888 of which 3,655,555,558.4 (41.125%) will be in the form of token sale and 3,455,555,552 (38.875%) will be given as a jackpot to those who have participated in the “token sale” rounds. The rest of the tokens 1,777,777,778 (20%) will remain with the team for the purposes of marketing, advisory, and further development of the project (see the Token Proceeds Utilization section for further details on the use of the proceeds from the token distribution). From Table 2 it becomes clear that the SPX tokens received per ETH are decreasing after each sale while the tokens distributed are increasing following the PreSale stage. A soft cap of US$4,000,000 (four million) is set and the hard cap is ~ 49,033 ETH.
The token sale will take place in four rounds and the amounts in each round are as follows:

Jackpots

Everyone who participated in the token sale will be eligible to receive tokens during the jackpots. Table 3 outlines the jackpot distribution schedule:

Road Map

Team

Alexey Kashirsky
CEO & Co-Founder
IT Mining Engineer graduate the Moscow State Mining University MBA program of Mining Nitu “MISiS” Adviser to the General Director of NP “Miners of Russia” and an adviser to the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, in the association “Industrial minerals”- an assistant to the president

Mikhail Krapivnoi
CIO & Co-Founder
ex Ceo of Man & Machine
A robotics research Company Multi Entrepreneur Champion in Online Poker and Chess Member of the AI Research Association Blockchain Evangelist And just a cool guy.

Evgeny Borchers
CVO & Co-Founder
A visionary,
experienced business expert focused on cryptocurrency investing, Fin-Tech, and affiliate marketing since 2013. Co-founder of a number of Fin-Tech projects, the most recent one of which DCEX, a digital currency exchange.

Alexander Baykiev
CMO & Co-founder
Responsible for the digital marketing, media communications, and creative content development to develop and sustain the brands of a number of businesses.

Advisor

Artemy Zorin
Advisor Graphics Design
Interactive designer user interface and visual and visual style for web and mobile applications. Visual design and branding manager, head of design department, „Yodiz“ studio. Cool Dude. Loves Blockchain.

Alexander Uglov
Advisor Marketing
Blockchain-evangelist, visionary. Has experience of staging in several projects C(SONM, Humaniq, etc). CEO of the Russian Media digital agency. 8 years’ experience in Internet marketing and creating web services.

Norman Chou
Advisor Strategic Business
Norman Chou is an blockchain enthusiast and believes hat blockchain will impact esociety in the most positive ways. worked for technology companies including CDW Dell, and EMC.

Lyubomir Serafimov
Advisor Operations
Served as a risk manager in a number of firms in the financial services industry, built risk systems and processes supporting the liquidity provision of cryptocurrency exchanges, and developed arbitrage trading strategies. An economic advisor to the Open Trading Network project and a Chief Strategy Officer at a digital currency exchange — DCEX.

Media