Project title: MeleeDAO
One-liner: A DAO for trustless tournaments in super smash melee (and later every game)
Project DAO: melee.sputnikdao.near
Challenge area: “Propose your own challenge”
Slides: (coming soon)
Repo: (coming soon)
Project members
- exgenesis.near
Project summary
-
Super Smash Brothers Melee is a 2001 crossover fighting video game developed by HAL Laboratory and published by Nintendo for the GameCube.
- Peer-to-peer tournaments are a perfect use-case for a DAO: Voting on rulesets Collect entry fees and donations and send them straight to the prize pool. Set up brackets as a smart contract. Verify match results through consensus. Resolve disputes by validating replay files or democratically. Pay out prizes as soon as placements are computed.
- Melee has a 20 year-long history, a thriving competitive scene, and a passionate community of players AND makers. After being neglected by Nintendo, the community has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for charity, organized thousands of independent tournaments, and even gained a new life during the pandemic as Project Slippi modded the game to allow netplay with a superior netcode to that provided by Nintendo. These achievements are a testament to the dynamism and grit of the community.
-
In 2020, Project Slippi, a mod for Melee designed to introduce quality-of-life features such as replays and online play, was updated to support rollback netcode and integrated matchmaking, allowing netplay across large distances with little latency. In the same year, an e-sports competition known as “The Big House” was sent a cease and desist by Nintendo, due to the usage of this mod.
- Tournaments usually require a third-party intermediary like smash.gg or specific tournament organizers (TOs). These central figures are vulnerable to legal action by companies like Nintendo, that seeks to stifle the community’s visibility to make way for its latest games. Peer-to-peer tournaments at the click of a button and the DAOs that govern them will protect the community and allow it to keep growing.
- This concept can be later expanded to any competitive game. I’m choosing Melee as the flagship community for this project due to its unique condition as a decentralized, grassroots community around a game with a hostile “mother company”.
Additional sections
This proposal is also being worked on in the context of the createbase hackathon. The project summary corresponds to the ideation stage and the following are short plans for what’s coming next.
- Stage 2: Pitch Deck*
- Flesh out core features like brackets, match consensus, entry fees, and prizes. Explore implementation details, present mockups.
- Stage 3. Demo*
- Video of a prototype contract in testnet that takes entry fees, computes placements, and pays out.
- Stage 4. Github Repo*
- Repository with the prototype code ready for further contribution.