BackorFade

Traditional financial solutions for sports fans (betting sites, fantasy sports), don’t accurately capture the unchanging and perpetual nature of fandom. Currently, sports betting requires you to bet on an event, encouraging short term gratification. In reality, people are fans of their teams for years, and hold steadfastly to them through the cycles of success and failure.

There is a natural connection between this and the way that crypto people hodl their favourite tokens through bears and bulls. We believe that web3 technology allows us to bring a financial solution rooted in this culture of loyalty to sports fans too, through the appropriately named perpetuals. We extend the idea of a perpetual beyond just financial instruments to real world cultures, using an index based on Elo rankings as a substitute for price. Our perpetual dex allows fans to finally hodl their teams as tightly as they support them in real life – unlike a traditional betting site, our perps never expire.

But our vision extends beyond being merely a financially rewarding platforms for fans. Our product can be the basis of a positive sum ecosystem for all fans – an on-chain record of long term support and loyalty. We ultimately would like other projects to build on this record.

There are three main components to our product – the data feed, the dex smart contract, and the UX/Front End.

We’ve used Chainlink functions for our Elo data, with a view to upgrading it to a node when we have more time. Ultimately we envisage our Elo data being decentralised – Elo is deterministic and football results are public knowledge, so anyone can verify our calculations. We think that our use of Chainlink to onboard numeric representations of non-financial real world concepts is quite novel.

We’re pretty proud of our quickly-hacked DEX design – it’s simple but elegantly solves many of the traditional issues with perps. We use a single pool system where each teams fans provides liquidity to all others, eliminating the traditional need for a liquidity provider as well as the necessity of funding rates.

Our UI is designed to be mobile-first and designed to be as user friendly towards a web2 native-audience as possible. Our UI is based off a number of screens that users can easily swipe between, displaying relevant data on each team’s perp as well as their current balance in each team. Our login system uses Privy.io, using account abstraction for easy sign up to our platform, and we use Unlimit to onramp from fiat.

Both our Chainlink functions and our DEX itself is deployed on Base – we believe that Base is the best ecosystem to launch a consumer DAPP focussed on non-web3 fans. We’re excited about the coming launch of their new wallet and there are also very natural integrations with Farcaster.