Potat.io

Bringing permissionless financial services and financial freedom to the globe, and enabling a mechanism of truth determination on-chain are two examples incredibly important primitives in what we deem the core of blockchain: a technological solution to social problems. Exploring protocols such as Alluo, Uma, Polygon, and others lead to many great conversations that only inspired us to strive for bigger.

This weekend, however, we decided to take things lighthearted. We took the protocols that have worked so hard to create valuable products, and used them inside out to create something new, pretty dumb, not effectively altruistic, but at least a little fun.

Potat.io is a global, financially-driven hot potato. Represented as an NFT that gets thrown from one owner to another, the danger of the potato is its draining effect on your wallet. When the owner of the potato, a money stream is opened from you to every other player in the game, draining your funds. The only way to stop the bleeding is to throw the potato to someone else.

But what's the catch? You have to catch them off guard. (not sure if that pun was intended)

To transfer the potato, the owner must create a proposal on Uma, proposing that the proposal of the transfer will not be refuted. The targeted recipient of the potato must take notice, and make sure to submit a refutation before the challenge window closes.

If the challenge window is missed, the potato is transferred. If the refutation goes through, the next potential recipient must refute the transfer in a shorter challenge period than the last. The competition gets serious, seriously quick.

We incorporated Alluo, Uma, Polygon, and ___.

While we couldn't resolve some bugs in our incorporation of Alluo, Alluo remains the meat of our mechanism. All players join the game by granting the smart contract access to their stibAlluoUSD tokens. When a player is chosen to own the potato, a stream is opened between the potato holder, and a 'vault' contract. Upon the transfer of the potato, the stream is closed, with the funds remaining in the vault. At this point, the funds in the vault get split across the non-holding players. A new stream is then made from the new potato holder.

One thing we would have preferred to use is a more flexible solution for streaming. Such a solution would be to up a stream between the potato holder and each individual recipient, rather than a middleman vault. This would probably require Superfluid's Instant Distribution Agreement contract. Better incorporation of the NFT recipients.

Our other integration was with UMA. UMA's intended use is that one entity may request a piece of information, which then gets an answer "proposed". After a proposal has been made, there is a challenge window during which one may refute the validity of the proposed statement. To resolve a refutation, UMA token holders must take a vote. Usually, refutations incur heavy fees due to the necessity of a DAO vote. However, knowing that this is not the case with the testnet (where instead, the resolution of the refutation can just be set), we realized that we can hijack UMA to create a system where one player can try to catch another player off guard.

To transfer, the potato holder must request a yes/no statement, then immediately propose an answer. Then, the recipient must take notice, and call the refutation. Since the mere existence of the refutation implies that the proposal must fail, the same person incentivized to refute (the potential potato catcher) can also immediately settle the refutation in his/her favor.

All of this is powered my Polygon and the Polygon Mumbai testnet.