When taking part in Fanscore tournaments via the free-to-play mode, players can earn points for correctly guessing the outcomes of sports events. Successful players move up in the weekly or monthly rankings as they accrue points. At the end of each week or month, there is a special draw where two NFTs are randomly selected as prizes—one from each common and uncommon rarity class (We'll increase the number of prizes once more players join the game).
The draw takes place as follows:
- Every point collected during the tournaments is a ticket to the draw.
- Participants' ticket numbers are determined based on their rank in the leaderboard table (e.g: If a player in 1st place has 100 points, they receive tickets numbered 1-100, the player in 2nd place with 50 points owns tickets numbered 101-150, etc.)
- NFT winners are selected on-chain with the help of our Chainlink VRF integration.
- As part of our integration, we have implemented a smart contract that takes the following input parameters:
- The draw ID, which is formatted as IYYYYXX where:
- I is the draw-type identifier.
- 1 or 2 signifies a weekly or monthly draw, respectively.
- YYYY is the draw year.
- XX is the serial number of the draw’s week or month.
- The number of tickets that are participating in the draw.
- The player who owns the winning ticket receives a prize.
Ultimately this creates a more exciting and transparent user experience, as users have the assurance that raffle results are provably fair and based on a reliable source of randomness. Fanscore’s free-to-play mode is ideal for experienced players who want to lower their risk or lack the required NFT. For players new to the game, it is a chance to try Fanscore for free, test our mechanics, and potentially win some NFTs.
A selection of sports events in which players can predict the results and win points
In order to help further fairness and transparency in Fanscore’s random draws, we needed access to a secure random number generator (RNG) that any user could independently audit. However, RNG solutions for smart contracts require several security considerations to prevent manipulation and ensure system integrity. For instance, RNG solutions derived from blockchain data like block hashes can be exploited by miners/validators, while off-chain RNG solutions derived from off-chain APIs are opaque and don’t provide users with definitive proof about the integrity of the process.
After reviewing various solutions, we selected Chainlink VRF because it’s based on cutting-edge academic research, supported by a time-tested oracle network, and secured through the generation and on-chain verification of cryptographic proofs that prove the integrity of each random number supplied to smart contracts.
Chainlink VRF works by combining block data that is still unknown when the request is made with the oracle node's pre-committed private key to generate both a random number and a cryptographic proof. The Fanscore smart contract will only accept the random number input if it has a valid cryptographic proof, and the cryptographic proof can only be generated if the VRF process is tamper-proof. This provides our users with automated and verifiable assurances directly on-chain that weekly/monthly raffles are provably fair and were not tampered with by the oracle, outside entities, or the Fanscore team.
In the future, we expect more Fanscore game mechanics to be implemented within smart contracts. We plan to use Chainlink VRF to help power further processes that rely on random outcomes
“Our goal is to create fair and transparent play-to-earn games for sports fans, and we chose Chainlink VRF as the leading verifiable RNG service that underpins our game mechanics. It helps our players to be confident in the raffle results and enables us to prove our commitment to the core values of the blockchain ecosystem.” – Fanscore founding team.
About Chainlink
Chainlink is the industry-standard Web3 services platform that has enabled trillions of dollars in transaction volume across DeFi, insurance, gaming, NFTs, and other major industries. As the leading decentralized oracle network, Chainlink enables developers to build feature-rich Web3 applications with seamless access to real-world data and off-chain computation across any blockchain and provides global enterprises with a universal gateway to all blockchains.
Learn more about Chainlink by visiting chain.link or reading the developer documentation at docs.chain.link. To discuss an integration, reach out to an expert.
About Fanscore
Fanscore is a Web3 peer-to-peer game created for sports fans around the world. We make use of play-to-earn and SocialFi mechanics to make watching sports great again.
Players can compete in sports tournaments, predict results and win in-game assets. To participate in a given tournament, a player needs to own an NFT attribute of the corresponding sport (soccer ball, hockey stick, baseball bat, etc.) The winnings can then be spent on in-game mechanics or cashed out.
Fanscore's strategic goal is to engage more people into watching, playing, and loving sports games of all kinds.