IFL Global Trophy Winners Announcement and Recap
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The Illuminate Fantasy League, powered by Polkamarkets, was a success. Today, we announce the eight winners of the IFL Global Trophies and share the highlights of the experience, and of 2022 in general.
Polkamarkets Labs joined the Moonbeam community in celebrating the 2022 Football World Cup during the Illuminate/22 Cup by creating the Illuminate Fantasy League, a fantasy predictions tournament dedicated exclusively to the World Cup and powered by Polkamarkets technology.
The IFL, as we’ve been calling it, has been a tremendous success for Polkamarkets Labs: it brought more engagement on Moonbeam than ever before and allowed to test and validate some of the technology that we’ve been developing for Polkamarkets Protocol V2, as well as community- and event-oriented use cases we have been ideating.
Today, we announce the eight winners of the IFL Global Trophies, a $1500 gift card prize pool awarded to the best overall IFL players, and share some details on the engagement and learnings from this fantastic experience.
A huge thank you to all the players who joined, as well as the Moonbeam community for their support. Thanks to the IFL, the future of the Polkamarkets Protocol is looking shinier than ever.
Announcing the IFL Global Trophy Winners
In addition to the more than 200 NFT achievement badges that were claimed by players, from the two collections created exclusively for the IFL, Polkamarkets Labs is rewarding eight players for their exceptional performance in the Illuminate Fantasy League. The rewards are paid out using gift cards in the amount of the prize.
For more information, check out the docs about the IFL Global Trophies for more details on the criteria and eligibility to win and claim the gift cards.
Without further ado, the IFL Global Trophy winners are:
Congratulations to all of you! Please follow the IFL Winner Verification Process to start claiming your gift cards. Remember that you must join the Polkamarkets Discord server so that you can easily communicate with the Polkamarkets Labs team throughout this process.
IFL in Numbers and Learnings
The Polkamarkets Protocol has been deployed for a year on Moonriver and Moonbeam and is a Top 10 dapp on each of them. There have been over 4000 Polkamarkets users on both networks, with just a little over 400 users on Moonbeam. In less than a month, more than 600 players played in the IFL, taking the overall usage of Polkamarkets on Moonbeam beyond 1000 users and showing that prediction markets can galvanize web3 enthusiasts in different scenarios, even during a bear market.
More than 2 million $IFL tokens were traded during the Illuminate Fantasy League. Leveraging the ERC-20 token support built for Polkamarkets Protocol V2, which was used for the first time in the IFL, the $IFL token was created specifically for this fantasy league and had no monetary value. Its usage was restricted to interacting with the IFL smart contracts via code. We saw that an event powered by a fantasy token that players could mint for free can unleash high engagement within a community — an important learning that opens the door to many use cases, and one that we will take into consideration going forward.
This event also highlighted a number of different forecasting strategies. We saw some players prioritize $IFL accumulation through trading, entering markets early and selling their positions for a profit as outcome prices fluctuated. We saw other players adopt all-or-nothing strategies, going all-in on certain high-probability markets in the hopes of reaping large rewards. We also saw players who were keen to accumulate NFT rewards and prioritize a high number of correct outcomes. With a high number of upsets during the World Cup, and quite a few draws during the Group Stage, certain strategies were more rewarding than others at different stages of the competition. Some players decided to pick their markets carefully, whereas others played in all markets. With the IFL, we saw that different variations on market design could better accommodate some forecasting profiles — something that can guide our feature selection going forward.
IFL Clubs were another feature created specifically for the IFL that showed promising results, despite its late launch. Over a dozen Clubs were created, allowing communities and groups to organize closed competitions amongst their members. Combined with the learning from fantasy tokens, our takeaway is that prediction markets could be a powerful tool for fostering engagement within communities, as they combine information discovery, skill and rewards in a fun way.
Finally, the rapid tech deployment and quick player adoption of the IFL also highlighted how strong the Polkamarkets Tech Suite is. The application proved to be quick to learn for newcomers, and the Polkamarkets Labs team was able to quickly deploy a customized version of the entire protocol and web application, including a flurry of new features, in a very short period of time. We’ll continue to solidify this capability to make it ever easier for anyone, including ourselves, to adopt and adapt Polkamarkets for a variety of use cases.
And then there’s the icing on the cake: we saw over 200% growth in social media engagement throughout the IFL. This experiment has been a tremendous success for Polkamarkets Labs and the wider Polkamarkets community.
Next up: Polkamarkets Protocol V2
Beyond the IFL, despite the bear market, Polkamarkets Labs and the Polkamarkets Protocol have had a strong 2022. In the new year, we’ll release Polkamarkets Protocol V2 with a series of enhancements, all of which have been made even better by the IFL experience.
We thank all Polkamarkets users and partners for their continued support this year, the IFL players for having spent the World Cup with us, and we invite all of you to stay tuned in 2023. We’ll continue to develop the best decentralized prediction markets and truth-finding tools in web3 space, and bring it to more users through our vision of a multichain experience.
Have a wonderful Holiday season, our best wishes for 2023!
About Polkamarkets
Polkamarkets is an Autonomous Prediction Market Protocol allowing web3 users to take positions on outcomes of real-world events.
