Alea: The Dice Games

Alea is a headless social betting app built on Warpcast where players can wager ‘dice’ on sporting events and compete for prizes against other users. The game is free-to-play but dice are finite and once you run out, the game is over. Every unique user who interacts with Alea’s frames will have a balance of 100 dice. These 100 dice can be used to bet on different events, such as moneyline bets, spreads, totals, and player props. Certain events like moneyline bets have weighted odds to highlight the favorite and the underdog. While the game is free-to-play at the moment, users will be able to pay for additional dice using valuable tokens in the future. They will be incentivized to do so by the prize pools, exclusive NFTs, and potential airdrops.

Alea is built using Frames.js and Next.js. We leveraged the helper functions built in Frame.js to validate the requests message and also easily generate the html for the frame. Furthermore the frame.js debugger was pivotal in the success of this project as it helped us quickly test our frames and provide helpful error feedback.

In order to build the profile finder we used Neynar's APIs to get information about the user such as their username, whether they have liked and followed, profile picture, and etc. Neynar also validated our request messages for our frames.

We deployed our server on Vercel and used the KV (redis) database to store player info such as dice balance, streaks, and bets. This was a great challenge as the redis database has no rollbacks and we need to make sure that every transaction was recorded accurately.

We also developed a notification system using Puppeteer where we send DCs to our players to notify them of when their bets have settled.