The little rodent, called Mia, starts the races simply by running inside its faithful wheel
After more than two years of development, a new form of gambling was launched on Ethereum: marbles tracks with hamsters.
The project is based on Siberian hamster Mia and her trusty wheel. Nicknamed „Mia & the Marbles“, it is an automated platform for marbles competitions and gambling created by a group of independent developers.
Although the concept behind the project may seem bizarre, in an interview with Cointelegraph the „M&M“ development team revealed how carefully designed the platform was:
„We guarantee fair and just competitions, and it is easy to prove that they take place live. We can guarantee that the races take place in real time and are not prerecorded. We do this with our live stream, which shows the first 8 bits of the current Ethereum blockhash on the race track, with 8 moving pegs. A high peg stands for a 1, a low peg for a 0“.
The team underlines that there is also a refund function for races that do not give a valid result after two days.
Although Mia & the Marbles may seem like a mere experiment or a hackaton project too absurd to be true, the developers claim that M&M is inspired by a passion for fair gambling.
The team has stated:
„We’ve always had the idea of developing an on-chain gambling platform. Unfortunately, scams are not uncommon in the crypto world. That’s why we brainstormed ideas with the aim of making the part of the game necessary to prove the correctness of the platform easy for anyone to understand and at the same time fun“.
The developers report that Mia is a very good colleague. There was a difficult moment in the beginning (when she was a puppy, Mia used to enjoy munching on developers‘ fingers) but today she is always ready to compete. While many protocols governed by DAO have to worry about incentive structures and the possibility that another project might take the most talented developers away from them, Mia runs happy in her wheel up to 8 kilometres a day.
The development team explained: „Hamsters are very active naturally and cover great distances at night to collect food.
In the future there will be even more complex tracks and possible „championships“ for marbles. The developers intend to continue building fun and fair games on Ethereum:
„We firmly believe that adding randomness to crypto gambling projects can dramatically increase the confidence players have in these products. We want to contribute to a fair world“.