Ethereumwisdom interviewed Steve from vDice. vDice is the future of internet gambling, the 1st Fully Decentralised Betting game, for the world’s 1st Programmable P2P network.
Hi Steve, how the idea behind vDice came up? Can you tell us a bit about the background of the team?
vDice started out of the desire to implement classic SatoshiDICE style on-blockchain betting as Ethereum smart contracts. In that sense the goal was simple and direct. Whenever a new blockchain is released to first application is classic SatoshiDICE style on-blockchain betting. But Ethereum is anything but an ordinary blockchain. The full-programmability of the Ethereum provides some unique engineering challenges and opportunities.
After that we were contacted by a lot of 3rd party developers who liked the game and were either building their own betting smart contracts or wanted to do that. Ethereum betting smart contracts, or any smart contract on Ethereum is expressed simply as an address (a long string of characters), behind which since executable code on the p2p network. So these developers were interested in leveraging a brand and its resources to promote their own code they were writing.
We realized there was an opportunity there to create a brand and platform of trusted 3rd party dapps. So then the team becomes anyone in the world writing a betting dapp and this is exactly what has happened. Of course, as we expected, these types of dapps are going to be attracting the most developers because the incentives are too well aligned. This is at the same time as Ethereum itself is growing and sucking up new developer talent. This is exactly what has happened and we have developers all over the world working on and building betting dapps active for the platform.
vDice is a permission-less and trustless platform that features a range of Ethereum gambling Dapps, How are you revolutionizing the gambling sector?
There are certain words that can get overused, like “revolutonize” and “disrupt”. Though there definitely is a new paradigm at play here. Ultimately our goal is just to give new developer talent already writing these betting dapps a brand to leverage to enjoy success from their code, in a growing Ethereum ecosystem.
What services do you offer now?
Right now we help developers with vetting of their code, design choices for UI/UX and general guidance about the best way to express their dapp to an audience on the site. This involves engineering decisions too of course. There is the main SatoshiDICE style on chain betting game and we are very shortly adding a Slot game called vSlots. The code is done and being 3rd party audited at the moment. It has some unique features which people will really enjoy.
You just released a Pre-Game Announcement for New Game on vDice platform. Can you talk more about it?
The pre-game announcement was to show the code for the new game to the community and update them about release. It is a slots game and the first 3rd party dapp in the vDapps section. It is implemented fully as an Ethereum Smart Contract and lives on the main ETH network.
Are you working on some strategic partnerships? What are your next steps?
We are constantly developing strategic partnerships in all aspects of the ecosystem. Given it is such early days that is actually super easy. The technology is nascent, everyone is passionate, and the growth is organic. The next step is the full release of vSlots on the main network. It is on the ropsten testnet now and performing well. Then, once the game is released with 3rd party audits, into the public domain, upgrades to the site generally will be done to bring into line with current web3 technology and oracle infrastructure.