Future of gambling? Hamster runs marble races on Ethereum

Mia, the „gambling dwarf hamster“ is said to run marble races with high stakes from her hamster wheel.

After a little more than two years of development, a new form of gambling will be published on the Ethereum-Mainnet on Sunday: hamster marble races.

The „Mia & the Marbles“ project, driven by the „white winter dwarf“ hamster Mia and her faithful hamster wheel, is an automated platform for marble races and gambling games created by a group of independent developers.

The concept behind the project may seem bizarre, but the development team at ‚M&M‘ explained in an interview with Cointelegraph how carefully the racing platform has been thought through.

„We guarantee races that are demonstrably fair, verifiable in real time and easy to verify,“ the developers said. „We can guarantee that the races are in real time and not pre-recorded. We do this with our video stream, which is verifiably real-time. In fact, it shows the first 8 bits of the current Ethereum block hash physically on the race track with 8 moving pins. A high pen stands for a 1, a low pen for a 0“.

The team says that there is also a payback function for races that do not produce a valid result after two days.

Mia & the Marbles seems like a thought experiment or Hackathon product. But the developers say that M&M is inspired by a passion for proven fair gaming.

„We have always liked the idea of Blockchain gambling projects. But unfortunately, fraud is not uncommon in the less regulated crypto room,“ the team says. „So we did a brainstorming session to make verifiable fairness easy for everyone to understand and have fun at the same time!“

The developers explained that Mia is an important employee. In the beginning there was a difficult phase when Mia was young, she liked to nibble on the developers‘ fingers. But today she is always ready to deliver. Many protocols that are controlled by DAOs have to worry about incentive structures and live with the fear that another protocol might poach her people through mergers. Mia, on the other hand, happily runs up to 8 kilometres a day in her bike.

„Hamsters are very active by nature and travel long distances at night in search of food,“ says the development team.

In the future there will be more and better tracks and possible „championship“ competitions for the marbles. The developers want to expand the project further towards fun, fair games on Ethereum.

„We strongly believe that real-world chance in crypto-games can dramatically increase players‘ confidence in these products. We want to contribute to a fair world“.