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  Benevolent Moon Gaming & Finance

Inspiration

The Benevolent Moon is Rising: A Narrative Prologue

As the Maj’s four wheeled jalopy barreled across the hills of his sub-Narnaic environs, two neural vehicles crashed headlong into each other resulting in a microcosmic little bang. From the ashes of the tumult arose a Benevolent Moon.

As our story unfolds, our Humble Noobian has just had his epiphanic moment where values such as fun, giving, and community synthesized into an idea:

What if we could provide frens in the cryptoverse with a game that allows them to engage in one of their favorite activities- calling the moon prices for their favorite tokens, while simultaneously being a catalyst for social impact via generating charitable donations for a benevolent organization that they get to help choose?

While the DAPP-sphere environs are wholly new to the Maj, the energy, intellects, and community one experiences there empowered him to explore the idea down the rabbit hole of ideation and team creation.

Feverishly, he wrote the idea down on slate and stone, making it real. Fearlessly he scoured the nooks and crannies of the blockchain galaxy for collaborators of like mind to come together in a beautifully Gestaltic manner to begin construction for a game for all to enjoy, that also creates meaningful social impact. First came young Wunderkind Sarzy, high school graduate at 14, and 6 years of developing mastery in the scripting of code, then came Phydy- the Solidity lead who would devour everything Chainlink in order to create elegant contracts, and finally we found Nhi, a multi-talented programmer who would take on the daunting task of building out the front end and create a beautiful UI/UX.

Good fortune smiled early on this band of builders as a serendipitous catalyst presented itself in a global Tournament called the 2021 Fall @Chainlink Hackathon

The training for competition at this prestigious event would be arduous and taxing. It would require expeditious development of new skills and sharpening of emerging acumen. But the unity and passion for their values-driven mission would allow the team to prevail regardless of the obstacles that stood in their way.

In the Present- and more formally:

Early in the development process, the founders of Benevolent Moon Gaming and Finance (BMGF) identified the pillars of our organizational mission. As a team, we have an unwavering fortress of conviction that all of our contributions to the blockchain space clearly manifest these values: Fun and engaging support of decentralised games and financial instruments. Global Community Focused on Community-galvanizing and ultimate community governance (DAO) Benevolent/ Service-Oriented Vision that all of our offerings have a charitable component. Palpable Financial, Charitable, and Social Benefits of all gaming and financial products.

This introduces our initial processes, utilizing best practices of design thinking and project startup, then maps the path that we have traveled in creating, developing, growing, deploying, and nurturing the Benevolent Moon Gaming and Finance suite of decentralized products.

Ultimately, the Benevolent Moon Squares- Daily Rocket, and its various iterations, marks the neophytic steps of a journey that we believe will be a long partnership with each other, and that our team has with the blockchain space as we pursue the ceaseless path to serve as guided by the pillars of our mission and values

What it does

Our Seminal Offering

Benevolent Moon Squares-Daily Rocket,is a predictive market game that engages passionate crypto community members with opportunities to call a daily closing price of a chosen token, while also having a choice to vote to direct a charitable donation to a benevolent organization if they win. The solution the games provide is that they are both fun and benevolent. Seeking fun experiences is a central pursuit in the human condition. Providing a game that allows crypto enthusiasts to feel a range of emotions in a healthy, and socially impactful manner (as each entry directs a portion to charity), has a potentially strong palpable emotional effect on users. Further, the game provides a community galvanizing effect as people cheer on their favorite token’s growth together.

How we built it

We built the project through various discussions and iterations considering architecture, design, efficiency, and security, followed by combining existing skillsets with new knowledge gleaned during the Chainlink Hackathon workshops and follow up communications with mentors, to create an efficient and elegant smart contract code to power our project. Our front end design likewise reflects collaborative efforts that utilize significant newly learned skills and tools. In all, our project leans heavily on the Chainlink suite of Keepers, Price Feeds, VRF, and External Adapters. We're using Moralis to connect user's wallet to the front-end, connect deployed contracts,and send and sign transactions. We are using SuperFluid's constant flow agreement and instant distribution agreement to manage movement of funds on the protocol. We use the CFA to pay out charities and the governance contract. We use the IDA to distribute incentives to voters in the DAO. With regards to the chain on which to launch, we intended to be on both Polygon and Harmony to start, but the presence of the full Chainlink toolbox on the former has us launching there. We foresee this project as cross-chain.

Challenges we ran into

We call them Opportunities

The primary challenge was the process of building a team of mission and values-aligned developers. We are a team of learners, who also want to create engaging user experiences, while also making a palpable social impact through the vehicle of the project. As such, since we sought people who fit our mission as opposed to those with polished skillsets in the tools we chose to use, we all experienced the exciting challenge that a steep learning curve presents. None of us had ever worked on a project like this before. Further, as this is currently a passion project, and all of us are working on our own careers and lives, carving (unpaid) time has been a challenge, but we enjoy working together so much that each of us has made sacrifices for the project. Finally, since we have designed and built a highly composable suite of tools, identifying the right fit for deploying our products has been a challenge as the diversity of tools we use has heretofore limited us with regards to where we can deploy to testnet- not every space has the full suite of Chainlink tools- yet. We hope to help change that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of the team process and the collective and individual learning we have experienced to date. Likewise, the aforementioned learning we all had to do to create this project represents a significant source of pride Also, prominent benevolent non-profit organizations like Lustgarten Foundation, UNICEF, FreeCodeCamp.com, Fleming Protocol, and Angel Protocol are poised to partner with us when we launch on mainnet. This latter piece has been affirming that our project is becoming what we intend. We are also very proud of the relationships we have built with each other, and with many in the space with whom we have connected during this process, and intend to grow those partnerships moving forward- this includes many mentors, and even some other teams that present synergistic opportunities for future offerings.

What we learned

We have learned a tremendous amount- from the workshop content, to the challenges of a startup, and even how to calculate meeting times across 4 time zones. I think each of us would have a different answer- but the content, process, timeline, balance, and innumerable intangibles have made this experience a graduate level crash course. Ultimately, we also learned that we are a very good team working together.

What's next for Benevolent Moon Gaming & Finance

The Future- the exciting part

With the hackathon as a primary launchpad, we will take the feedback and experience to make BMF&G mainnet ready, while continuing to develop other components in the pipeline. We have supporters waiting for an MVP, strong advisorship, conviction for the work we are doing and why we are doing it, and a genuine affection for working together. We also realize that Chainlink has given us such a tremendous opportunity, we understand we have a responsibility to be ambassadors for the tools we use- and as such, we are already advocating with the likes of Harmony and EVMOS to offer the full suite of Chainlink tools to enrich their blockchains (and provide us an opportunity to be on those chains, as well).

Specifically, already in the works are innovative use cases for NFTs,BMS DAO, Lunar Sports Fantasy NBA, a partnership with Fleming Protocol to collaborate on Biomedical Research gamification for the blockchain, and the BMS financial suite. As a mission driven project, we are only limited by our imagination and efforts. Seeking opportunities to build meaningful, impactful projects that are fun, benevolent, community-centric and financially opportunistic will be the continuance of our journey. Our work has just begun.

Built With

• amazon-web-services
• chainlink
• evm
• javascript
• kovan
• moralis
• passion
• python
• react
• solidity
• superfluid
• teamwork