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Esports and Daily Fantasy
Skrilla is poised to ride the explosive growth forecast for esports, the spectator sport of professional video gaming, leveraging off 2.6 billion engaged gamers globally and an industry experiencing nearly 40% annual viewership growth.
With a combination of a passionate fanbase, professional and scaling event organisation, marquee sponsors and live media coverage, the infrastructure is also in place for significant fan betting. This represents a huge opportunity for dedicated esports wagering providers to facilitate the estimated $23bn in betting turnover across 19 million unique players by 2020, and to fill the gap left by traditional betting companies.
Corporate bookmakers have failed to connect with the esports community by continuing to offer esports as a limited subset of their existing sports wagering offering, rather than a standalone brand and platform, tailored to the unique community and their needs. Skrilla have recently launched a Daily Fantasy Esports platform to meet those needs and to allow fans to better engage, and monetize their esports knowledge.
Much like their sports-based counterparts, Daily Fantasy Esports (DFE) consist of online contests in which members compete by creating fictional teams made up of real professional gamers competing in major tournaments. As the matches take place, players can view live streams, chat with competitors and see how their players are performing in real time, all while competing for cash prizes. This new format for esports betting, allows fans to engage with both the matches and players on a deeper level. However, as a new industry arises, new problems arise with it and esports wagering is no exception.
These problems are mostly brought about by the centralized nature of traditional betting products and include a lack of trust and transparency, poor liquidity, regionalised gameplay and high transaction fees. In order to tackle these problems and deliver a better solution for esports fans, Puntaa and the GAMURS Group have teamed up to build the Skrilla platform, which is currently live, and launch a crypto-token to be used as the core unit of exchange within the ecosystem.
What is Skrilla?
Skrilla is a skill-based Daily Fantasy Esports platform spearheaded by two of the leading technology firms in the wagering and esports scenes, Puntaa and the GAMURS Group. Puntaa, is known for building the first fully-licenced P2P social betting platform and the GAMURS group is a leading esports media network, with their flagship asset Dot Esports reaching nearly 3.5 million monthly active members. Together, they have built an “innovative, scalable, and engaging entertainment and wagering platform” where fans can connect through healthy competition, social engagement and betting.
Skrilla’s licensed and fully regulated DFE platform is already live in Australia, and rolling out over the coming months across North America and Europe, making it one of a select few licensed and regulated esports bookmakers globally. However the team has a bigger vision, to develop “the world’s premier esports P2P betting platform”, featuring a betting exchange, pool betting, and head-to-head skill based competitions.
By leveraging blockchain technology, Skrilla intend to tackle issues that are present with centralised esports wagering. According to the whitepaper:
“The benefits include; improved trust and transparency, enhanced liquidity through global player pools, reduced fees, and incentivised behaviours (participation, referrals, and social sharing) that grow the network effects for the benefit of all members.”
How does it Daily Fantasy work/future features?
As previously stated, the Skrilla DFE platform is already up and running at www.skrilla.com.
Members can pick a roster comprising of professional players from teams competing in a day’s fixtures. They spend their fixed budget on players, each of whom have a price tag. The goal is to assemble a roster of players, under the salary cap, that will score the most points.
As matches unfold in real time, selected players accrue points based on their actions within the games. Once the final match has concluded the members with rosters comprising the best performing players share in the prize pool.
Skrilla intends to roll out further game types beyond Daily Fantasy, starting with a head-to-head skill based competition which allows members to wager on themselves in head-to-head or team vs team contests like FIFA or League of Legends. The winner taking home the tokens staked.
The team also intend to develop a betting exchange in which members can be their own bookmakers, accepting and creating bets with other exchange members, with the token integrated as the core form of payment. This brings us to Skrilla’s use of the blockchain and SKR token.
Skrilla Token and Sale
Skrilla (SKR) is an ERC20 token based on the Ethereum blockchain. The Skrilla token serves as a utility token and will be used as the core currency to enter contests, place bets and receive winnings within the DFE platform. Although the SKR token will eventually become the sole currency used to transact within the Skrilla platform, it will initially be used alongside traditional fiat, to ensure near immediate utility for token holders.
As Skrilla progresses it’s roadmap and SKR becomes the sole unit of exchange, other external use cases for the token will be implemented within the GAMURS Group ecosystem, along with external partners. These include the purchase of education content and coaching on DoubleXP and premium services on Teamfind.
SKR tokens will also be allocated to a “Growth pool” to be used as work tokens, providing liquidity to the network and creating user incentives that will drive behaviors that grow the network for the benefit of all. Tokens will be distributed to members from the Growth pool for work completed such as account verification, referring friends, sharing content, entry into paid contests, and following social accounts.
In order to fund the continued development, integration of the token and marketing of the live platform, SKR Tokens will be distributed through a Token Sale. The Skrilla Token Sale will begin pre-sale on the 6th of October, 2017, with the sale lasting until the 23rd of October.
The SKR tokens available for purchase during the Token Sale represent 60% of the total supply, 1,000,000,000 SKR, which will be available at a starting price of 0.0004 ETH per token. Ether is the only payment method available. The funding target is set at 50,000 ETH with a hard cap of 240,000 ETH.
Click here to see the Skrilla (SKR) page on CryptoCompare.