From a handful of businesses in the early 2000s to a multibillion-dollar market today, online poker has evolved to become a multibillion-dollar industry. And, from its inception, internet poker has faced two major issues: game fairness and player fund safety. These two problems were at the heart of a series of industry scandals that brought down several top online poker operations. That is why Virtue Poker is here to solve all of your concerns.

https://youtu.be/2LNM_0DC95s

What is Virtue Poker?

Virtue Poker, founded in 2015 by Ryan Gittleson, is a decentralized online poker platform. The concept was quickly incubated by ConsenSys, a famous and well-known business in the crypto sphere that builds decentralized software.

Virtue Poker is using the unique qualities of Blockchain technology paired with P2P networks to give a safe, honest environment to play. Virtue Poker never holds player funds; instead, game purchases are held in escrow via Ethereum “Smart Contracts” while they play, and payouts occur in 30 seconds or less. Poker’s peer-to-peer shuffling mechanism ensures game security by never storing the deck on a centralized server, and it is the first and only blockchain-based poker platform certified by the Malta gaming authority.

Outstanding Features

What is the project trying to achieve?

One of the Virtue Poker team’s goals is to redesign the Virtue Poker desktop version into an Electron application. In order for our platform to be successful, the Virtue Poker application must go through extensive testing to ensure that the games are sufficiently fair, that the registration and identity verification method prevents low-level multi-accounting and underage gambling, and that their data storage mechanism is capable of tracking data points required for compliance and detecting cheating.

Enhance the P2P Messaging Backbone

The application employs runtime-swappable plug-in implementations for several transports and currently employs a simple HTTP-server-based message exploder. Virtue Poker will use a more industrial-strength backbone for deployment.

Justice Implementation

The inclusion of one or more Justices in a game enables for permanent offline (IPFS) archive of peer-level activity, which is useful for attempting to detect collusion or bot play, or simply to provide after-the-fact verification that everything happened smoothly. A Justice, as part of the consensus mechanism, stops two players with compromised clients from cheating in a three-player game, something that other 51 percent-vulnerable consensus techniques cannot do.

Front-End Commercial Quality

Prior to the first round of user testing, Virtue Poker will re-skin our existing application and create a user interface for the lobby.

What is the unique selling point?

Ethereum Smart Contracts

Ethereum contracts are utilized for several purposes:

• As a registry (lobby) for all active games on the platform
• As a short-term escrow service for players seated at a given table
• As a repository for all game-specific parameters such as buy-in amount, payout percentages and game type
• Reporting end game results

Game Client

The game client will initially be a desktop application that serves as a state-engine, shuffles and deals cards using a Mental Poker protocol, has a light wallet, and connects to other players at a specified poker table.

Mental Poker – Eliminate the need for a third party to shuffle the cards.

The Virtue team has spent the last two years researching how to use mental poker skills in a realistic setting. By encrypting and shuffling the cards jointly in a way that allows each card to be “opened” by one, some, or the entire group, mental poker ensures that the decks are unreadable to any single player. The protocol employs communication encryption, which allows cards to be encrypted or decrypted in any order.

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P2P Messaging

The peer-to-peer messaging backbone is used as a communication and synchronization technique to ensure that all players at a given table see the same game state.

IPFS (by Protocol Labs, alongside File-coin), a distributed web project, will be used to keep track of all hand histories for all games played on the platform. Logs can be recovered at a later date for compliance or for the game security team to evaluate.

Justice System- Virtue Poker platform node

Virtue Poker serves as a POS (Proof of Stake) platform. Justices are the nodes in the Virtue Poker platform.

Justices are non-playing peers allocated to poker tables who provide security and safety to Virtue Poker network players in exchange for player fees (Platform fees). Justices are assigned to tables and are randomly reassigned to another table every few seconds. These validators sign every transaction on the platform and submit hand histories to IPFS for storage. Justice nodes provide the network with the following:

• Dispute resolution: In the rare situation of a disagreement between two peers, a justice can settle the disagreement in real-time and give the pot to the winner.
• Data-feed: needed by gaming regulatory agencies, this service ensured vital services such as collision detection, bot detection, and multi-account identification.
• Partial storage of a player’s encryption key: Justices will keep a decryption key for the table’s players. When a player quits out of a hand before it is completed, this is referred to as the “Dropped Player Problem” in Mental Poker. This is problematic because in order for community cards to be disclosed and a hand to be completed, all players must share encryption keys.

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Using Shamir’s Secret Sharing, each player’s keys can be encrypted and sent to all other players as well as the Justice. If a player drops, the justice can request the pieces from each player and decrypt the assembled pieces in order to finish the hand. All of the preceding is handled automatically by a user’s computer running a justice node.

A justice node can be activated by installing the Justice client on a machine, launching the app, and activating the Justice. The justice node’s fees (VPP/ETH) are proportional to his stake in Virtue tokens (VPPs) in the justice registry.

Roadmap

Virtue Poker was founded in May 2015, and its prototype has been refined over the last two years. Since its beginning, their application has been evaluated on a weekly basis. The team has been playing poker internally using a Mental Poker implementation that works on the Ethereum testnets.

Virtue Poker’s first version is a desktop Python client that generates a unique smart contract for each table instance. A Mental Poker protocol for card shuffling and a game engine have been successfully created by the team. The game engine is a state machine that communicates with other peers through a peer-to-peer messaging protocol and connects to Ethereum when peers establish and join a certain table. The program can already play 6-handed games at a rate of 70-80 hands per hour, which is comparable to existing online poker networks.

Technical Data

Key Metrics

• Token Name: Virtue Poker Point
• Ticker: VPP
• Blockchain: Ethereum
• Token Standard: ERC20
• Contract: 0x5eeaa2dcb23056f4e8654a349e57ebe5e76b5e6e
• Token Type: Ultility
• ICO Token Price: 1 VPP = 0.125 USD
• Fundraising Goal: 2,000,000 TOKEN
• Total Supply: 500,000,000
• Circulating Supply: 14,504,255.00 VPP

Token Allocation

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Token Sale

IDO (Ended)

• Date: 28 MAY – 28 MAY, 2021
• Tokens for Sale: 2,000,000 VPP
• Soft Cap: $25,000
• Fundraising Goal: $250,000
• Personal Cap: 400USDT
• Where to buy: SuperStarter
• % of Total Supply: 0.4%
• Accept: TBA
• Access: Public

Token Release Schedule

Virtue Poker has been launched the VPP token following their IDO on May 28th, 2021 via Uniswap. Virtue Poker has been launched their IDO on SuperFarm’s SuperStarter platform

Token Use Case

• VPPs can be “locked” in a smart contract called the Justice Registry, which allows users to stack tokens and validate hands on the network in exchange for fees.
• In-game currency: Can be used as in-game currency, but only in conjunction with ETH.
• Access to special tournaments
• Can be earned as rake back

How to own the token?

• Download Virtue poker client
  A user will visit virtue.poker and download the client for Windows, Mac, or Linux. The application is downloadable and includes a shuffler, game engine, and user interface.

• Registration
  Users will then be required to create an uPort identity (if they haven’t already created one). The user will have to receive an attestation regarding country of residence and age prior to playing on Virtue Poker when required.

• Fund a light wallet
  The user will be brought to a page that directs them to fund the Light wallet that is pre-built into the client.

• Create a Game or Join a Game
  The user will have the option to create a private game where he or she can invite other players to join, or go to the lobby which will show all publicly available games via the Casino registry.

• Buy-in
  The user can join either a public or private game by sending ETH or VPP to the table address of the game they’d wish to join. The table or smart contract will sit on the Ethereum blockchain and acts as an escrow account while gameplay is conducted. Each game on Virtue Poker is represented by a table contract that has the custom parameters of the particular game.

• Gameplay
  The peers at the table will form a P2P subnet and will use a mental poker protocol that requires each individual peer to shuffle the deck of cards

• Payouts
  When a tournament is completed, or when a player leaves the table for a cash game, the table contract will auto-execute and payout each individual player when winnings are due.

Markets and Community

Markets

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Community

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Backers

Team

Virtue Poker’s staff, led by Ryan Gittleson and Hamilton Carmean, feature an all-star team including a former NASA engineer, PokerStars’ original CMO, and more. It’s the perfect group of people fit to create a platform worthy of the next generation of poker. Virtue Poker has also teamed up to create some monster partnerships with leading poker players such as Dan Colman, Brian Rast, and the legendary Phil Ivey.

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Investors

Press

Conclusion

Pros

Team and Advisory

The team is a part of ConsenSys, which is a well-known and respected company in the crypto sphere, with great networking abilities. The legal advisory board is very experienced in the iGaming industry, obviously, legal challenges will arise along the way and top legal consultation is needed. The team is sponsored by top poker players which can help Virtue Poker to penetrate into the online poker industry.

Trust difficulties with large online poker companies

With the existing structure of the top online gaming sites, it appears that we have no choice but to believe their word that our dollars will be protected and that the game will be fair. Events such as the Full Tilt Ponzi scheme (2011), Lock Poker’s usage of player cash (2015), and others provide strong motivation to rebuild the online gambling infrastructure. Virtue Poker is constructing a decentralized platform with utmost transparency.

With Virtue Poker, a player keeps his funds in his wallet or in a smart contract (on the Ethereum blockchain), his cards are encrypted, and the shuffle is handled by a proven algorithm that does not rely on a third party.

Main-net live in Oct-Nov 2018

Tokens will be transferred only when the main network becomes up in October/November 2018. This means that once the tokens are listed on exchanges, we expect to see not only speculative demand for the tokens but also real demand for the tokens from players who want to participate in the Virtue Poker Platform or users who want to join the ecosystem by becoming Nodes in the Virtue Poker Network.

Cons

Team & Advisory board:

Extensive experience and understanding in the required disciplines (Blockchain and crypto, high-level igaming legal consultation, sponsored by world-class poker players)

Backend and Technology

An excellent application for Ethereum smart contracts and IPFS, was able to use the Mental Poker algorithm to shuffle cards without the usage of a middleman.

Whitepaper

The technology and user flow of the Virtual Poker platform are thoroughly explained.

Token Use

VPPs will be locked in by nodes to receive fees, by players to obtain higher rake-back, and will only be used to participate in special events.

Project Potential

With the potential for exponential expansion, the online poker business is currently valued at 2.5 billion USD. Creating a user base from scratch is a massive undertaking.

Virtue Poker has built a solid platform with innovative features such as a fully decentralized game arbitration system, client-side shuffle, and non-custodial handling of player cash. However, in order to achieve a considerable market share in the online poker field, the platform must overcome two fundamental difficulties.

• Currency support: As of now, Virtue Poker only takes ETH and VPP for deposits, which is a significant disadvantage given that wire transfers, card purchases, and Bitcoin account for the vast majority of online poker business. Because ETH is not a big source of player demand, most large sites do not take it.
• Earning trust and recognition in the online poker space: One would think that the decision between a provably fair deck and a black box deck would be obvious, but players continue to go toward the more prominent providers, which always have the risk of being rigged. Virtue Poker would be wise to increase marketing, both in the form of partnerships and sponsored tournaments, in order to spread the word as rapidly as possible. When poker fans see their favorite players trust the platform, they will trust it as well.

Overall, Virtue Poker is a fantastic platform with a bright future and a fantastic token system. They are expanding slowly, and only time will tell if they will be able to compete with some of the larger online poker companies. It’s certainly feasible, and they have the team and backing to pull it off.

Find more information about Virtue Poker:

Website: https://virtue.poker/?utm_source=icodrops

Whitepaper: https://virtue.poker/public/whitepaper.pdf

Telegram: https://t.me/virtue_poker

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Virtue_Poker

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Virtuepoker/

If you have any questions, comments, suggestions, or ideas about the project, please email ventures@coincu.com.

KAZ

Coincu Venture