Introducing Rounder: Part I — The first DeFi Platform for Poker Staking

So here is the question that i have been pondering over for the last three years: Can you bootstrap a decentralized business from just an idea?

Back in 2017, when I was still a crypto freshman, I had the idea of a decentralized poker staking platform that would have gone by the name Rounder (after the iconic 1998 poker movie starring Matt Damon and Edward Norton). I actually managed to assemble a team, consisting of myself (then a PhD student at Ghent University) and two undergrad students. None were any wiser about blockchain technology and after one of us got a job that actually paid, the team disbanded.

The question remained though and so I became a tokenomics researcher at a-Qube. It was our vision to give ideas a tangible value, but unfortunately, that project is on hiatus now as well. Now, with three years more experience in tokenomics and decentralized business models, I am bringing Rounder back to the table. Thanks to the new paradigms liquidity mining has brought to the crypto space, I think it might well be possible to create a complex, self-funding project, but more more about that below. For now let me explain…

What is Poker Staking

For some, it’s a pastime, others call it gambling, a skill game, or even a sport. Professional poker players call it their job. For me, poker is an investment.

And a good investment it is indeed. For example, an online tournament player who is confidently beating the games at his familiar buy-in range can expect a ROI of up to 50 %. However, there is a high investment risk attached. Online tournament players usually have hundreds, sometimes thousands of players competing for the top spots and, although luck does hardly play any role for your long-term profits, you will certainly notice its effects in the short run. In at least four out of five tournaments, you will lose your buy-in, no matter how good a player you are. And when you land in the money, chances are you won’t make up for all the times you busted out. It is not uncommon to burn through a few hundred buy-ins until you finally land a big score that brings you in the profit zone again.

For this reason, many professional or semi-professional players sell some or all of their action to investors (who usually are professional players or retired professionals as well). You can call these staking agreements an insurance against bad luck if you want.

For example, a typical long-term staking contract may look like this: the stakee obligates himself to play at least 200 tournaments a month, while the staker provides the bankroll in full. The net profits are split 50/50. This has benefits for both parties. The stakee can play risk-free and gets to keep half of his winnings. The staker who provides the capital can expect an average monthly return of 25 %. That’s an annualized yield between 300 % (assuming the staker does not reinvest his returns) and 1355 % (under the albeit unrealistic assumption that he can perfectly reinvest his returns every month).

1355 % — Are you kidding me?

Yes. Well, slightly. You see, staking does not scale that well. As I said, the assumption that a staker can reinvest is indeed unrealistic, since it means letting your horses play on higher stakes (for which they are often not ready), or finding more players to stake. There is a reason why professional staking stables are constantly on the lookout for new horses, but the number of capable players who are willing to commit to at least 200 tournaments a month is limited. After all, we are talking about a time commitment of about 20 hours per week.

For this reason, short-term agreements on single tournaments or a set of tournaments that are played on a single day are usually more attractive to semi-professionals. This brings it’s own problems however. It can be difficult and time consuming to try and find stakers, especially when it’s on a short notice. For the stakers, they have to trust their horses not to run off with their money, or try to cheat by underreporting their winning.

This is where Rounder comes in. By building a DeFi platform around a poker staking economy, I believe that we can improve the reinvestability of staking returns, combat fraud, and make it easier for deserving poker players to obtain staking, even on a short notice.

Stay tuned to learn more about how Rounder seeks to achieve this, as well as an introduction into the technical features and Rounder tokenomics.

Call for Participation: I am looking for enthusiastic developers to help me bring Rounder to life. If you want to participate, feel free to contact me via Twitter (@RNDRcoin) or via PM on Bitcointalk (T_W_Kaiser).