S P 8 D E

THE GAME OF CHANCE CHANGED

A DECENTRALIZED PLATFORM FOR GAMING DAPPS

Introduction

Spade – implemented within a protocol created and maintained by the scientists at IOHK, the pioneers in the realm of blockchain innovation and cryptography development, has its aim to revolutionize the ever-growing gaming industry as we know it today. Spade’s aim is to disrupt the multi-billion-dollar gambling industry for the first time since the creation of the Internet. The online i-gaming is the industry with no future: centralized and obscure, the online casinos currently in existence can only offer ridiculous house edges,

uncertainty in processing the payments, inward and otherwise, and the need to rely on the randomness generated elsewhere. In layman terms, you can’t be sure that the game design is fair, that the randomness used to generate game outcomes is unbiased and that you will get you money back if you win. The blockchain is the fit-for-purpose technology that is set to solve all of these issues. However, there is always a catch… In spite of all the benefits the blockchain environment introduces to the gambling world its current state of implementation can be best described by a single word – tragic.

Blockchain based gambling platforms are plagued with issues primarily inherent to the current state of the underlying technology. Decentralization imposes heavy tax on the efficiency: games are fair, but you can’t play them. The obstacle seems unsurpassable: so should we just pause for a while and wait for the technology to advance further? No. If no one has done it before, we will. Spade is a blockchain-based platform for developing distributed gaming applications. As a platform for gaming applications with some self-respect, we are equipped with the protocol for generating fresh unbiased randomness.

As a team with some aspirations we have it provably fair and completely decentralized. We feel that it is important to be true to the spirit of the venture we embark upon: if blockchain is the universal and undisputed source of truth then it should also be the broadcast channel for randomness. We think that single points of failure should be perceived by anyone as just a funny relic of the past. And yes, we are Proof-Of-Stake (POS) efficient in terms of cost and time alike. Spade is built on top of Ouroboros, the most advanced POS protocol that underpins the Cardano blockchain. A cradle of academic approach to the blockchain technology, Cardano is the beam of progress that shines forward towards the future of distributed applications.

The Industry

In the European Union the online gambling industry grew nearly 19% from the first half of 2015 until the first half of 2016. The casino industry in particular generated over US$2 billion in revenues during this period. It is expected that until 2020 this number will reach US$2.25 billion per year representing about 12.5% revenue growth.

In the US for the period 2015 until 2016 online casino revenues increased by 24.4% and are expected to reach US$4 billion by 2020. The EU and the US are just a small part of the worldwide casino industry.

Globally, the projections of the online casino show that for the period 2017-2025 the market will experience a spectacular growth of about 130% reaching the phenomenal US$97 billion with cumulative annual growth rate of nearly 11%. Currently over 6 million adults are officially participating in gambling activities around the world with projections of reaching 10 million by 2020.

We further believe that as blockchain technologies advance, and propagate for the first time in history unbiased provable randomness, these figures will become a gross underestimation of what reality proves to be. By removing a variety of frictions from the gaming market, Spade is set to unleash the monetary gains hidden therein. We won’t take a cut from it. We are determined to create a frictionless market for gaming ideas: what previously was left to casinos and other intermediaries, now will be channeled to the community.

The Competitors

There are many and varied casino or gambling blockchain projects, however, in our opinion only a handful deserve the attention of the public and even fewer have come anywhere close to addressing the three fundamental problems we have spoken of earlier. In short, it suffices to say that, unlike Spade none of them, have meticulously and rigorously proven to have a complete and working solution to all of three central problems. For those interested in the details, the full whitepaper presents a more in-depth analysis of the projects. Here, we think, it will suffice to just place the following table.

The table above highlights that now as never one needs to appreciate the wisdom embedded in a “devil’s in the detail” idiom: multimillion dollar casino projects who claim to revolutionize the multibillion dollar gambling industry do not appear to address the most fundamental problems this revolution creates. Everyone is recommended to briefly look at the history of the last century to see what a disaster any unplanned revolution is.

The Mechanics of Spade

We build Spade on top of the blockchain called Cardano [25]. The Cardano project itself is a monumental work that embraced the best practices and most far reaching innovations in the area of cryptocurrencies and packed them into a single state-of-art system. In what follows we will illustrate how Spade provides an environment for the design of gambling applications which are characterized with :

1. Close-to-absent transaction fees and Proof-of-Stake powered scalability that is beyond the reach of any other on-chain casino protocol currently in existence;

2. A mechanism to generate decentralized provably uniform randomness at arbitrary time-spans;

3. Provides rich Smart Contract functionality that allows for creativity in game design that is bounded solely by the fantasy of the developer (and the demand for the resulting product, of course);

As we have mentioned multiple times before, fairness of the outcome is essential for gambling, it is the core. Spade utilizes Cardano to design its ecosystem and thereby solves the problems normally associated with the on-chain casinos described above.

1. Transaction fees and scalability: Ouroboros is a Proof-of-Stake protocol, meaning that at any given time, a trusted set of nodes maintain the integrity of the system. This protocol was shown in an experimental setting to be resistant to a handful of attacks that are known to plague other systems and are directly relevant to gambling protocols.

2. Random number generation: finally, and, arguably, most importantly, Ouroboros, the POS protocol underlying Cardano blockchain in its workings fully relies upon generating unbiased (i.e. uniformly distributed) entropy.

The beauty of the idea is that the blockchain itself serves as a broadcast channel: the uniform randomness is generated on-chain! In layman terms, this means that Ouroboros:

a. Generates provably random numbers;

b. Guarantees that everyone will get them. Unchanged.

We will touch upon the topic of randomness again in the technical part below. Apart from providing elegant solutions to the existential problems of on-chain casino protocols, Cardano is a fit-for-purpose for solving several less critical issues:

3. Flexible and finance application-tailored scripting language: Cardano is designed by the masters of code and is set to follow best practices; its scripting language is tailored for financial applications: security and execution can be “extremely well understood”. Any language suited for finance is the natural candidate for casino development: the underlying logic (at least from the programming viewpoint) of these two domains is similar.

We have just now praised Cardano: it is scalable, secure, complex and yet elegant. The major takeaway, however, is that designing a successful POS protocol requires solving the same problems that constrain the creation of provably fair on-chain casinos. With Cardano as a backbone, Spade is set to become the best of its kind, this fit was just meant to be. The token distribution begins on Friday, December 08, 2017 and ends on Monday, February 12, 2018 and is scheduled.

The Pre-Sale lasts for 14 days while each Sale phase will be seven days followed by a Jackpot that is distributed entirely within a single day after every Sale. During the Jackpots additional tokens given away to the participants of every Sale (including the Pre-Sale) – the distribution of the tokens is based on randomly generated factors with different weight (see the full white paper for details).

In short, the earlier one buys tokens the more tokens will be allocated to them – for example, if you bought during the Pre-Sale you will receive more tokens during Jackpots I, II, III, and IV; while if you bought during Sale III then you will receive tokens only from Jackpots III and IV. Also, the earlier you bought the more “weight” (or chance for taking larger part of the Jackpots) your tokens will have during the Jackpot phases.

The token distribution begins on Friday, December 08, 2017 and ends on Monday, February 12, 2018 and is scheduled. The Pre-Sale lasts for 14 days while each Sale phase will be seven days followed by a Jackpot that is distributed entirely within a single day after every Sale. During the Jackpots additional tokens given away to the participants of every Sale (including the Pre-Sale) – the distribution of the tokens is based on randomly generated factors with different weight (see the full white paper for details).

Token Utilization

In total we will distribute 8,888,888,888 SPX tokens of which 20% (1,777,777,777.6 SPX) will remain with the team while all others will be sold. In the chart above we demonstrate how we plan to use the proceeds from the sales of the SPX token; those that remain with the team can be used for further development or urgent business requirements (e.g. advisory or operations). There is no limit on how much tokens an individual can purchase and in case some tokens are not bought during the Sale phases they will be distributed according to the following schedule: