Decentralized Arcade Machine (DAM) Grant Proposal

[khanondrum]

DAM x PUSH Grant Proposal

Project Name: Decentralized Arcade Machine (DAM)

Email: roshaan@umbrellachain.com

About You:
Roshaan Khan:
I am the founder of DAM and have been in the blockchain space professionally for about 4 years, but have been involved as an investor and supporter for about 6 years. My background is as a Technical Product Manager in web3 for major L1s, but also moonlit as a consultant helping startups however I can. After spending my first couple of years in the industry helping nonprofits, funds, and incubators through education and documentation. During this phase, I wrote the original whitepaper for the Government Blockchain Association (GBA). Shortly after I joined Block.One, the creators of the EOS blockchain and EOSIO VM, as a TPM. Here I published my first piece of research in the blockchain industry detailing privacy in public blockchain technologies from an enterprise perspective. You can find that here.

Near the end of my stint at Block.One I began consulting a few projects specifically on economic and tokenomic system design as well as overall web3 product strategy. Then I joined NEM, a chain from 2014 derived from Bitcoin and one of the grandfathers of the blockchain space. They started a new chain named Symbol for which I architected and led the development of Garush, a fully onchain NFT system for encoding NFTs onchain and creating a censorship-resistant marketplace for these onchain assets. I enjoyed my role at NEM, but they were undergoing some organizational changes that would’ve changed my role, so we amiably split paths at the start of 2022.

During the last few years, I have been tinkering with close friends on various products in the space. From DeFi to NFTs to Infrastructure and Dev Tooling. While doing so we built on almost every major L1/L2 in the industry and learned of the shortcomings. Having a full career product managing the advancement of L1s we saw glaring issues in the options available to developers and began work on what is now known as Umbrella Labs. We are building various pieces of technology that focus on easing the end-user and developer experiences within web3.

Finally, we went to Eth-SF on November 4th and met the PUSH team. We pitched our vision for DAM and what we were trying to build. As hardcore gamers ourselves we felt there was a glaring disconnect between how web3 games are built and how gamers actually game. We were met with great support from their team, and they recommended we apply for grants to push our hackathon project to the next level. Now here we are with this proposal!

Twitter: @khanondrum

Discord: khanondrum#2202

Other Team Members:
Jimmy Nagles - Front-end engineer with a passion for games and web3. He’s been actively contributing to the industry since 2020, having worked on NFT projects and Crypto projects alike.

Shadman Hossain - A seasoned blockchain engineer and solution architect. He’s run blockchain initiatives at some of the biggest US federal contractors in the world.

Project TL:DR
DAM lets devs focus on making good games by offering an “on-switch” for game devs to activate web3 features. DAM uses web3 to power Collectibles, a Metaverse Marketplace, and eSports as a Service through a novel Proof of Victory mechanism.

Proposal Category
Primary Category: Gaming
Secondary Categories: NFT, DAO, Tooling

Project Overview
Building Good Games Is Hard. The average AAA game takes about four years to develop, with a minimum cost of over $80 million. It’s just as hard to build a successful web3 application. In 2021, VCs invested ~$30 billion across 1,278 web3 deals. Making the average raise $23.5M with expectations of needing more.

DAM lets devs focus on making good games.

Connect your game’s APIs to DAM to enable:

1. “win2earn” contracts that act as PVP lobbies for users. Put your money where your mouth is and test your skills against other players with your proof of victory stamped on-chain for a global leaderboard and bonus prizes.
2. Integration into DAM’s homepage - a metaverse game marketplace (think Steam) where you can tap a community of gamers.
3. Enable onchain collectibles and currencies for your games through the DAM Marketplace.

The architecture diagrams are complete, and we know exactly what to build and have clarity on how to build most of it. The biggest lift will be the web2 aspect of creating an API system for games to connect to and relay in-game information to spin up PVP contracts and decide on winners. The Marketplace and NFT features are things our team has done before, so we’re confident that they will not be too difficult.

During the hackathon, we integrated PUSH as a chat mechanism and are using the Skale blockchain to offer gasless environments for both players and game developers. We also have a full business model (fee on PVP Contracts and marketplace) and a utility token ($DAM) that’s used to secure the Decentralized Arcade Machine.

We believe that with a $500k budget (and devs onboarded from day 1) we could get to a fully functioning product within 6 months. We have support from the internal Skale team, so the help of their solution engineers and community is a key factor in our ability to deliver quickly.

Value Proposition to Push Protocol
PUSH is used in two major ways within the DAM ecosystem. For the Eth-SF hackathon, we implemented the wallet-to-wallet chat functionality that’s visible in our Github. We want to use PUSH to create chat lobbies between players before, after, and during matches. Furthermore, this chat function allows developers not to have to worry about creating social functions within their application and can let us handle it through PUSH.

Additionally, we want to utilize PUSH to deliver notifications to users when Collectibles are sold/bought, when games are won/lost, when games begin/end, and when users receive a challenge from another player. Creating a robust notification system is key to a seamless gaming experience, and we believe PUSH is the best way to accomplish this.

Lastly, there are a plethora of game developers utilizing PUSH in their stack. We believe we can help these games reach a larger audience and have more robust features. Consequently supporting the PUSH ecosystem of developers with an easy-to-use tool.

Funding Requested
148,148 PUSH @ $0.27 ($40k USD)

Milestones

Phase 1: 3 Months

1. Create PVP smart contract logic
   Smart contract system that handles multiple players’ inbound payments and then sends a win2earn prize to the winning address based on an off-chain signal.
   Logic Includes:

• Setting up a PVP lobby in-game creates contract on-chain.
• Variable “Lobby SIze” which is the number of players allowed in the match.
• Variable “Buy In” which is the amount players must input to contract to play.
• Contract reads game state to determine who was the winner.
• Contract pays out the winner of the match after deducting the platform fee.
• Contract records “proof-of-victory” on-chain for DAM to query.

2. Publish a multiplayer version of Flappy Bird connected to DAM as a proof of concept

• Simple game that lets 2-10 players play flappy bird. The player who gets the furthest wins the pot.

3. Implement a PUSH notification system for PVP Contract

• Notifications to winners and losers involved in a competitive match. Includes the amount of crypto that was spent and how much (if any) was won.

Future Phases (these are not included as deliverables in the current funding round)

1. Create API for web2 games to easily implement PVP contracts. The current solution is more web3 friendly.
2. Create an NFT marketplace for in-game assets with PUSH notifications
3. Implement a PUSH chat lobby for players that join a game
4. Design Metaverse experience in Unity

Wallet Address
0xD3972d92ef96e745526Ee368780879B5bBD7b074

Relevant Links & Attachments
It says new users can only put 1 link per post. Since my email took that link, I’ll share the deck and other links in a comment below. Sorry about the inconvenience!

Referral
The PUSH team encouraged us to submit a grant proposal. Jun Gong and John Snow on Telegram were our main points of contact at the hackathon DAM was born at and afterward. We also spoke to other members of the team who were supportive such as Jaf, Richa, Pranshu, and Madeline.

[khanondrum]

Company Deck: DAM Public Deck - Google Slides
Company Twitter: https://twitter.com/DeArcadeMachine
Hackathon Github: GitHub - JimmyNagles/DAM

You can also see mention of DAM on our company page (www.umbrellachain.com)

[007the3rd]

This proposal shows a deep knowledge of the industry and a thorough plan for execution. I believe there is a large market at stake, which this proposal can help tackle.

Of all the proposals I’ve read, this one deserves to be funded/built. There is an excellent team with the background for creating this type of product. I can’t wait to see this project get funding and come to market.

[khanondrum]

Thank you for your kind words! We are just as excited to build DAM. It’s a solution that can’t be built using web2 and really shows the power of programmable money in web3!

[Jimmy96]

Thankful for all the help
Currently working on our first game
looking forward to showing you guys what we are building for DAM!

[MrJaf]

Thank you so much for joining Office hours today and explaining DAM in detail.

From my point of view the value proposition for Push is very clear and very attractive. Game developers who decide to turn on the switch will immediately be offering Web3 communication to players through Push Protocol. And there are plenty of use cases that can derive from marketplaces and game basic functions.

Are you connected to game developer communities or groups that can serve as alpha testers for the initial release? Have you been in conversations with them?

Also - maybe is a bit too early to think about this - , but have you given thoughts to your strategy to attract more game developers to implement DAM?

[Shadmoney]

PUSH will be a fundamental building block of web3 gaming and this is a key piece of infrastructure that will bring mass adoption

[khanondrum]

The office hours were great, thank you for the invite! Looking forward to joining more in the future!

We have a few game devs in our network already that we ran our idea by for validation and were met with resoundingly positive feedback, but we havent began any aggressive outreach or sales process.

We have a decent sized cohort of gamers to test our first MVP which will be a Flappy Bird style multiplayer game that has the PVP contract functionality. Itll be on testnet at first so theyll be playing for free and we can use $DAM airdrops to incentivize this activity.

We plan to use this test phase to attract game developers and publishers with existing games on the market and focus on supporting integrations. DAM gets better with the more games available so this is going to be a top priority once we’re ready.

To game studios we have 4 main value propositions:

• 3% of every game their community plays can scale to making more than a game does in physical sales.
• They can set a variable royalty fee NFT collectables and skins to create liquid markets for game assets.
• We modernize their company and integrate web3 which can make them more attractive to future investors and players.
• Launching eSports leagues can run millions of dollars and take years to become profitable. Games can implement an eSports scene through us with ease. Play, watch, stream, and win.

Thanks for the great questions! Let me know if theres anything else thats unclear. We’re super excited to get this off the ground

[redskinz]

My friend and I friends are huge gamers and top ranked in a few games. But making money at a game you’re good at is really hard, way harder than people make it sound.

I’m super excited for this proposal because this could be the first web3 project that lets me quit my job and rely on my skills in the “metaverse” to make a salary without having to buy scammy tokens or nfts and risk my money.

[OnePiece]

Yeah I was top 1% in almost every game i play seriously not have never made a penny. Curious to see this go live!

[SSkidgoku]

Hello DAM Team,

I hope all is well. This idea is revolutionary! The biggest problem with gaming is raising money and hiring employees. Many video games take years to develop with no revenue. Free-to-play games use revenue through extra items and only cosmetic changes since it’s the only revenue stream they can use. DAM solves this problem by giving equity to the game developers and decentralizing the platform and online gaming. I’m a massive fan of smaller teams’ ability to compete with large teams like epic games - the gaming industry needs this.

One question I have is I would like some clarification on the winner takes all method - will this specifically be done through proof of victory through ETH, stables, or native token?

Thank you for your time!

[khanondrum]

In terms of payment methods supported, we will likely begin with an ETH, SKL, and USDC implementation since we’re building on EVM (and on Skale specifically) and expanding the offering from there. The final goal is for each lobby to be denominated in a Dollar amount and for the player to be able to pay in whatever currency they wish, it would all auto-convert to stables prior to entry in the contract.

We will never force our native token ($DAM) into any scenario. If $DAM eventually gets liquid enough on the USDC pair for it to be supported as a payment option then we’d consider it. But as a utility token, we want the value of $DAM to be around making the experience better and more rewarding, not as a prize to be dumped on market as soon as you get it from winning a match.

[MrJaf]

Thanks @khanondrum
A couple more questions/comments:

Regarding the Milestones

Milestone 1

• From my Point of View we should aim to connect with a game that has some traction and have them integrate DAM. I understand the gaming industry is a very closed industry, however a brand new Flappy Bird POC that you have to start marketing will take a long time before it gets users, hence there will not be a lot of value for Push at this stage
• Could we also attach some rough numbers regarding users? How many users could we target at this stage?
• How much percentage of the funding are you looking for this initial milestone?

Milestones 2, 3, 4…

• Would be great to add more clarity here so we attach each milestone to measurable goals. It’s important for us to ensure the goals are being met in order to proceed to the following milestone and do tranches deployments.
• Same as mentioned above. Users, Notification numbers, Games implementing DAM, etc; are great measurable goals for grants tracking.

[khanondrum]

We agree with your notes regarding milestone 1 and have made progress since we first published this proposal 2 weeks ago. To address the issue of building our own game (which we went over during office hours) we found an existing web3 game we can pilot with called CryptoColosseum (https://cryptocolosseum.com/). Crypto Colosseum has been live on the Polygon network for over a year and has often been in the top 10 games on that network. We believe this traction is enough to prove out DAM and provide value to Push.

CryptoColosseum currently has over 200 Daily Active Users. Since the team is interested in a partnership that would include some messaging to their community, we expect to capture around half of this to get to 100 DAUs during our pilot.

In order to clarify our Milestones and spending I wanted to rewrite how we’d approach that and if you approve can update this into the original proposal.

Total Funding: 148,148 PUSH @ $0.27 ($40k USD)

Milestone 1: Create PVP smart contract logic
Smart contract system that handles multiple players’ inbound payments and then sends a win2earn prize to the winning address based on an off-chain signal.
Milestone 1 objectives-

• Setting up a PVP lobby in CryptoColosseum creates a contract on-chain.
• “Lobby SIze” which is the number of players allowed in the match.
• “MatchCost” which is the amount players must input to contract to play.
• Contract calls game state to determine who was the winner.
• Contract pays out the winner of the match after deducting the platform fee.
• Publish contract to Skale Testnet
  Funding - 49,382.66 PUSH

Milestone 2: Integrate CryptoColosseum’s game Delph’s Table to DAM as a proof of concept to test payment and payout flow.
Milestone 2 objectives-

• Connect PVP contract to game APIs provided to us by the CryptoColosseum team
• Publish PVP contract to Skale mainnet
• PVP Contract issues souldboundNFT for “proof-of-victory”
• Gather user feedback from at least 100 users
• Send at least 250 Proof of Victory soulboundNFTs
  Funding - 49,382.66 PUSH

Milestone 3: Implement a PUSH notification system for PVP Contract

• Notifications to winners and losers involved in a competitive match. Includes the amount of crypto that was spent and how much (if any) was won.
• A major value add to PUSH is adding new users from the Skale ecosystem. We plan to send Push notifications to at least 1000 unique users over the course of our pilot program. Many of which have never received any before.
  Funding - 49,382.66 PUSH

[minority]

is push already on SKALE?

[OnePiece]

Someone from the PUSH team can correct me if I’m wrong but since PUSH is an EVM protocol that can read onchain or offchain data and users have to opt-in to these notifications we can use events from Skales chain to send notifications to any ethereum address.

[MrJaf]

How you are going to trigger a notification is all based on your custom logic! you can monitor an event from any chain (evm or not) and then trigger a notification to an ethereum address using Push Protocol.
For triggering the notification, take a look on our push-sdk for sending gasless notifications

Here is the docs with an example on how to use the push-sdk to send notifications that you can use:

Using Push SDK (Gasless)

[MrJaf]

Now that Push Grants Program v2.0 is in place and this proposal already met the criteria to go to the next stage - after talking with the team members, this proposal will follow the new route and restart the process.

This topic will be archived for future reference.
cc: @khanondrum