Meet YOLOrekt — Ethereum’s Newest dApp.

yogesh srihari
YOLOrekt
Published in
5 min readAug 21, 2019

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The short term options trading dApp you’ve been waiting for is finally here!

There are only a few things one can do with their ETH at this point in time. They can trade it, hodl it, or purchase porn with it. Recently online gaming has been one of the more obvious use cases with many developers and game designers pouring into the vertical with varied and often limited success. The problem is that there are too many games that are not that enjoyable to play or have very complicated on boarding for first time users to not only the game, but to Ethereum in general.

That is all about to change, for today we set YOLOrekt free into the digital wild. At its core, YOLOrekt is a trader-vs-trader bet on the price of ETH/USD game. By fusing intuitive design, gamification and a fun social atmosphere YOLOrekt provides a new spin to short term options trading, which both new and veteran traders alike will have a blast playing.

How to Play YOLOrekt

Traders are thrown into three minute games with a minute break where their knowledge of the market and prediction of where the price of ETH is headed on a short term basis is put to the test.

Each game is broken down into three phases:

Phase 1: Determining the Game’s Strike Price

Each game starts out by determining what the ‘Game’s Strike Price’ will be by taking the averaged price of ETH over the initial thirty seconds of the game. YOLOrekt does not use a price oracle, but instead pulls the market price of ETH directly from Coinbase’s Price Websocket API. This number is what traders will use to bet against in the following phase to predict if the market price of ETH will be above or below the “Game’s Strike Price” at the end of each three minute game or the final Waiting Phase.

Phase 1: Determines the games Strike Price players bet against

Phase 2: Betting

Once the Game’s Strike Price has been set, players have one minute to bet on whether the market price of ETH at the end of each game will be above or below this number. All bets are put into two pools, those who predict the price will be above, and those who predict the price will be below.

Phase 2: Players bet if ETH will be up or down at the end of the game

Phase 3: Waiting

After the Betting Phase, all bets are finalized, recorded and displayed for all players to view. This final phase of the game is where traders can sit back and relax, as they must wait a minute and a half to see if they won or not. At the end of this phase, winners are announced followed by a one minute Cooldown Phase before the next game starts back up again.

Phase 3: Players sit back and wait for the game to end to see how they do

How do winnings and payouts work:

At the end of each game, the losing side’s bets are pooled and distributed to the winners proportionately. If a player bets more than the other winners, he or she will receive more of the pool. Now if a player loses, their losses are also proportionate to the size of their, meaning if a player bets more than the other players, in this situation that player won’t lose their entire bet, just a fraction. YOLOrekt takes a small 1% fee on the winning ETH pool only.

YOLOrekt’s Game Theory & Mechanics

We wanted to avoid giving any significant advantage to last movers, hence we implemented a time-decaying gain factor to incentivize prompt betting — giving early movers better gains (or winnings) and discouraging people from bet stuffing late in the round. As a trader, you can keep an eye on current volatility and make your bet by waiting a little longer and taking lesser gains but with higher probability, or alternately, betting early with higher potential gain but lower probability of winning the game.

On Boarding through Incremental Decentralization

One of the biggest hurdles to overcome today with Ethereum based dApp’s is generating mass scale adoption. Due to their complex and often confusing on boarding process, entering the Ethereum space as a new user is a challenge. To date dApps force their users to fully decentralize first, often losing the interest of a new user.

When building YOLOrekt one of our main goals was to simplify the on boarding process in order to make that initial touch point with the game easier for new users. By integrating with the Abridged SDK, we were able to create a simple web2 style username/password with email recovery on boarding and account creation experience inside a web3 dApp. Contract addresses are created counterfactually through the use of Create2 (an opt code issued in a recent Ethereum fork). What this means is that when a new user understands the basics of wallet management (how cryptography, public/private keys, etc. work) and want a bit more security, they can deploy and secure their account contract. Finally, if players don’t have ETH already, we’ve integrated Wyre so first timers to Ethereum can purchase ETH with their debit card directly in the wallet, without ever leaving the game.

What this means is that users can start playing instantly, only having to go through a few steps from account creation to enjoying YOLOrekt. Bam!

We call this incremental decentralization, which allows users can go at their own pace.

Some Final Words…

Before YOLOrekt came along, option trading was a complicated investment instrument used mostly by finance veterans. YOLOrekt brings the same mechanics and outcomes, while introducing a fun and social game-like atmosphere both amateur and veteran traders alike will easily understand and enjoy.

So what are you waiting for, go fucking give it a whirl!

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