DeCon

Inspiration

DeCon came upon as an idea for the blockchain community and more to share valuable information amongst each other. Prediction markets are extremely accurate at predicting future events because of the way they connect multiple sources of information. The idea became to set up a prediction market where anyone can fund the questions they have and whether it is for business or personal reasons and from there watch the lines move and expect those outcomes to occur.

What it does

DeCon uses the Solana network and has 3 actions on the platform. Funding a question, placing a bet on an existing question, and collecting your rewards. Funding a question will take a deposit from a user and set up a market using LMSR to determine the rewards for bettors, insuring bettors can have a promised reward if their outcome occurs but also insuring the sum of rewards will never exceed the funds of the question(initial fund from funder + funds from placed bets). Placing a bet takes a yes or no along with a bet amount and connects that with a question until the question has been resolved. Collecting your reward verifies your bet is on the winning side and returns you your promised reward for a given question if you are owed more than 0 Sol

How we built it

We build this using the anchor framework, we use a tuktuk for the timing of our results and Solana's front end dapp-scaffold template and tutorials.

Challenges we ran into

When developing on chain much of the tools we wanted to use were poorly documented compared to things we are used to. Using tuktuk which seemed simple took us forever and understanding what much of our smartcontract was doing was a challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Launching a project on solana's devnet with an interactive front end was awesome. We were very proud to use tools that seemed like very few people actually knew about and we felt like new developers who spent more time reading and looking stuff up rather than writing code so when things got to working it felt amazing.

What we learned

A whole lot about programming on chain, this was completely new and we had to learn about what smart contracts actually were(a lot scarier in name) we got to play around with the fact that everything is an address in solana and got to watch our objects through Solscanner to see what was actually happening on the devnet.

What's next for DeCon

Our next step is our idea with how we can pull more users. We want to focus decon so it's not centered around people making money off of the questions they pose but people getting their questions answered correctly. The goal for that is to ad optional incentives funders can add for certain people who have shown a positive track record for betting to get them to research and answer your question. We less so are focused on hunting the big bettors but more so finding the winning bettors so we want to implement something to reward them more to incentivize a community of our users who work to solve questions and then have betting boosts if they answer with a high enough percentage of accuracy.

Built With

• anchor
• next.js
• rust
• tuktuk
• typescripts