The problem Far.Win solves

Let's talk about fundraising - principally how the FarWin prize game solves leveraging private finance.

TLDR: Far.Win is a prize game miniapp live today on Base mainnet on Farcaster that is designed to be used for fundraising. Players use the miniapp to buy randomly generated Mondrian-style art and 15% of the purchase goes to the cause, public good or project, the rest goes to the prize pool ready for lucky winners! Our vision is that most Public Goods, causes and projects run a FarWin generating billions of dollars of new funding. Read on to learn how Farwins leverage private finance and why this is important.

Links:
Website
Github
Miniapp on Farcaster
Demo video (loom)

But first, FarWin was built by this team (Farcaster names): @fraserbrown.eth @jeefx.eth and @eirlis. Please follow us because we are quite unknown on this platform yet even though we are very friendly! (Irish, Georgian and Ukrainian)

Fundraising is an issue for Public Goods, causes and projects generally. No-one will argue.

Publics Goods finance is well documented as a weak spot for blockchain projects. At the root of the issue is the fact that philanthropic or conditional funding is needed. Even if finance is blended e.g. if you give that amount, we will give this or we will invest this, sustainability remains an open question. If you consider the ecological investments needed to sustain our planet, sadly there is not enough public finance to sweeten the deal for enough private capital to do what is needed. Change is needed but better financing solutions must also be found. FarWin’s Founder, Fraser Brown has spent 10 years researching and implementing innovations in this sphere both tradfi and blockchain.

Charities are commonplace and there are many platforms aimed at supporting any and every type of cause. But there has been little in the way of innovation in fundraising for some years. Quadratic funding and gitcoin are noteworthy exceptions, of course.

Lotteries are one the most powerful ways to fundraise for good causes but thanks to regulation that power is monopolized by governments. Lotteries are effective because people play both to support but arguably mainly for fun and the chance of winning prizes big and small. Obviously, such regulations stem from times long before blockchains and bonding curves and like much regulation potentially inhibit innovation for the worse. Interestingly, games that require skill to win are excluded from all lottery regulations and FarWin winners will be the most advanced and skillfully created bots. So, if you want a spoiler … our skilled bot lottery is designed to exploit this loophole and drive billions to good causes and projects.

Each entry mints an artwork which can be a winner of an ETH prize depending on its colours. 15% of the mint cost is paid at the time of mint to the cause’s wallet. There is a ~10% chance of minting five colours which will win 2X the current mint price, and a white square in the centre wins the entire prize pool. White is rare with a 1/256 chance of minting. A bonding curve governs the mint price, which increases aggressively. Roughly speaking, the first mint price is around $5 (in ETH) increasing to $50 so early players winning 2x are highly motivated to promote the game and wait for higher mint prices such that their prize is correspondingly higher. If there is a white square winner the game resets and continues in perpetuity and unstoppably. For full details of the game mechanics refer to the www.far.win or the miniapp FAQs.

Projects can load their FarWin with project tokens and define how many are added to each new artwork when they are minted. Owners can claim these after 1M seconds (about 11 days). In this way, where altruistic incentives are absent, FarWin can still be used by small projects or teams to distribute tokens in a way that yields ETH enough to bootstrap.

Where does private finance come in?

Bots can play FarWins and our testing showed that they can mint around 5 NFTs per block and will find a winner after about 20-30 minutes. Their cost is, essentially, gas and their gain is the prize pool sum at the time they began minting. When a prize pool reaches a certain threshold, therefore, profit motivated actors will assess probabilistic gains and use such a bot to mint until they win. The conditions for such activities are purely mathematical - it does not depend on this actor liking the cause or wanting to support in any way. As such, FarWin creates conditions where Public Goods and causes can leverage private capital. In a typical game cycle the FarWin creator will make around 1 ETH and probabilistically the average prize will be around 5 ETH. Of the 1 ETH raised, around 50% will likely come from private capital. This innovation makes FarWin an important addition to the funding landscape with the potential of generating billions of dollars of new funding. Our vision is that most Public Goods, causes and projects run a FarWin.

Challenges I ran into

1. The FarWin bonding curve has a complex math formula that we had to implement despite Solidity's limitations. To make it work fully on-chain, we had to utilise ABDK Math Library that operates with signed 64.64-bit fixed point numbers for the complex operations to meet the bonding curve equation.
2. Achieving randomness was also a challenge. We started our journey with Chainlink v1, updating it to Chainlink v2 to avoid gas limitations and achieve more efficiency, however, during the later stages of the development, we made the strategic decision to switch to Gelato VRF. Gelato uses Drand as a randomness source, and their approach offered us a more suitable developer experience and a flexible subscription model. Gelato's integration of public randomness infrastructure aligned better with our development goals and made it the ideal choice for FarWin.
3. FarWin was easy to create as a web app. But we knew it should live on Farcaster but retain its secure, scalable, and clear platform architecture. Developing a minimalist yet complex user experience that interacted seamlessly with decentralised infrastructure was a challenge that required us to pull together as a team. From a design perspective, we focused on achieving real-time responsiveness and ensured that every on-chain or off-chain action had a clear visual representation. Long days and night on team calls leveraging product, blockchain and full-stake experience was the way we got this done.