Popular gambling DApp ICONBet has a few changes planned for early 2022. Let’s take a look.
The reinvention of an ICON classic
As many people know, ICONBet is a fully decentralized gambling platform with bitcoin sportsbooks — there is no single entity that gets richer off the woes of others when the house wins. Instead, ICONBet issues daily TAP tokens to everybody who gambles on their site — the more you gamble each day, the more TAP you claim — and when people lose at the games, the ICX is divided up and paid out to those who have staked TAP.
Currently, all the betting and TAP information is visible on the ICONBet site. However, ICONBet is now working on building a new TAP dashboard completely separate from the casino site.
“We have a lot of gamblers on our site who aren’t there for the TAP and don’t care about ownership of ICONBet. It doesn’t leave a great taste in their mouths when they lose bets and see other people talking about receiving dividends,” ICONBet said in an interview with The Iconist. “Gamblers don’t need to see ownership details such as total excess per day and so on. We’ll still have some information available for casino customers though, such as bets being placed and the drive action — people like to see others actually using the casino and the big wins that do happen.”
The planned changes include a link on the main site to go to the TAP dashboard. There, TAP holders will be able to sign in with a wallet that holds TAP. It will also be possible to link a non-Ledger wallet with a Ledger wallet, which makes things easier for people who want to HODL their TAP and not have to log into their wallet every time they want to access the dashboard.
Another planned change is a manual claiming process for TAP dividends, similar to how Balanced and OMM work. This will significantly reduce the load on the chain.
You won’t have to claim your TAP every single day though. “You can let it sit for up to a month. After that, it starts to incur penalties because we don’t want to hold your money — we’re not a bank,” ICONBet said.
Making ICONBet better for mobile, and other improvements
Other planned changes include a top-notch mobile experience, NFT player profiles and, eventually, moving the entire gambling site to a stablecoin.
In order to make ICONBet usable on mobile, they were originally going to make an app, but have since decided to optimize the entire site for mobile web browsers. This will be made possible through a technology called PlayCanvas, which is a javascript-based 3D engine that’s built for the browser.
“We want the mobile to be better than the desktop. We want the casual pop in and pop out players, and that definitely has to be for mobile,” ICONBet said.
NFT player profiles will add interesting new functionality to the site. Players’ information will be saved in their profiles, allowing them to more easily claim rewards, participate in tournaments and use affiliate codes when referring others to the site.
New games coming soon: Liquid Sports, Poker and Supernode Racing
Players will be happy to know about some new games in the works due to be launched in early 2022.
Liquid Sports is a sports book DApp being launched on the ICE network.
“Some Iconists may be wondering why we chose ICE for Liquid Sports,” ICONBet said. “It really just makes more sense for it to be on that network to allow it to evolve and include more communities by offering wrapped ETH. Even though it’s not technically ICON or ICX, it still helps bring those people into the ICON community.”
ICONBet also assured that playing on Liquid Sports would still pay out to TAP holders. “The only difference is that instead of only having a small community from ICON to earn dividends from, we’re trying to expand to all the networks.”
They also assured us that Liquid Sports will be completely different from ZenSports, the other popular sports betting DApp built on ICON. Like most DApps of its kind, ZenSports is a peer-to-peer (p2p) sports book — when you place a bet, you need to wait for someone to accept it. However Liquid Sports is being built on a much more traditional model where you can place a bet and the owner of the sports book takes your money, but with an innovative twist — the bank will be funded by liquidity pools, allowing the DApp to remain completely decentralized.
“In our model, the people can be the bank themselves. We’re doing something new which we really hope will start catching on,” ICONBet said.
The second new game that’s in the works is poker, which will be of the Texas Hold ‘Em variety.
It is being built as a decentralized app with provably fair and transparent deck and hand information, something that used to be common in the early days of online poker but disappeared when the space became more competitive.
“Over the last couple decades, online poker has become more geared toward the professionals. We’re going for the regular players. We want it to be social and fun. We want people to be able to play without feeling like they don’t have any chance of winning because they’re up against a bunch of professionals,” ICONBet said.
Poker players will also be able to wager with other tokens on the ICON network, such as TAP, stablecoins, etc. They’ll be releasing a list of accepted coins, so nobody will be able to make fake tokens.
More information about the poker game will be released soon. It is certainly a game to look forward to, especially seeing as how ICONBet has brought in pro poker players to provide input on the game.
It’s also worth noting that the main development team of ICONBet is also the same team behind Supernode Racing, an NFT game being built right now as a Contribution Proposal System-funded project. They have promised more big news about Supernode Racing will come next year.
