Leveraging Meta Transactions to Deliver a Seamless Esports Tournament Experience for Players
English translation: To use the blockchain for the benefit of competitors , Community Gaming bridged the gap between usability and decentralization.
When we first started building CommunityGaming.io, we understood the challenge inherent to creating a platform that both delivered a web2 experience and effectively used the blockchain as a beneficial utility for our audience. It was a daunting task, but over the last year and a half, we’ve made significant progress towards this goal — integrating critical features within a digestible methodology that quickly onboards our users to the platform.
In short, we implemented a three step solution that allows our platform to scale for users, especially those without prior blockchain experience.
Step 1: Sign up in 60 seconds or less; regardless of crypto wallet knowledge level.
The Why: Our team explored many different ways of simplifying the wallet experience for users. Initially, we allowed users to only link their MetaMask wallet. This was not ideal for two reasons: one, many tournament competitors didn’t want to install and use a browser extension, and two, many players were on their mobile phone/tablets where MetaMask isn’t an ideal solution.
The How: Integrating with Magic Link to create a seamless experience for a wallet to be generated for users if they don’t have an existing one to connect. Over 50% of our users have never had a self-managed wallet prior to signing up.
The Win: Immediately we started seeing a higher rate of signups for tournaments by removing a step and automatically generating a secure, non-custodial wallet for them in the background.
Step 2: Supporting Layer 2 chains on top of Ethereum for lower transaction costs
The Why: On Ethereum Mainnet, rising transaction costs began to hinder our ability to offer an accessible experience — the first tournament contract we deployed cost Community Gaming $142.04, ballooning to $2000 just for the main contract (and we had other contracts deployed that it’s required to work with).
The How: To lower costs, Community Gaming became a multi-chain platform last year by integrating with Polygon and BNB Chain.
The Win: Almost instantly, our costs decreased significantly. For example, when paying out 32 players instantly after a tournament ends, our fee was $0.01 on Polygon, a massive savings from what could be $50 — $100 on Ethereum Mainnet.
Step 3: Subsidizing transaction costs for seamless tournament creation and instant prize distribution.
The Why: Currently, if a player or tournament organizer needed to make any on-chain interaction, such as creating a crypto tournament, they’d be required to own the native token of that chain in their wallet to pay transaction fees. (A native token is the token that a blockchain uses to pay miners their network fees for validating transactions such as ETH or BNB.)
The How: To understand what we fixed, let’s use an example. Say you’re a tournament organizer who creates a 10 USDC entry-fee tournament on Polygon. (Bonus: We’ve partnered with Ramp Network which allows anyone to onramp and off ramp directly to Polygon and Ethereum Mainnet by purchasing crypto with a credit card. Geo-limitations apply but we’re working on it!)
Before inviting any players, you, the tournament organizer, would be required to pay the tournament creation transaction fee. Then each player enrolling in the tournament will need to purchase 10 USDC for the entry fee and have an additional ~0.1 Matic (Polygon’s native token) for the transaction fee.
Of course, this isn’t ideal, so we worked hard on developing a system that allows everyone (organizers and players) to interact with the platform without having to purchase tokens solely to satisfy these tedious micro-transaction fees.
The Win: As of this month, Community Gaming is using Meta Transactions to make the experience of our users simpler on both Polygon and BNB Chain. Now, players and tournament organizers can easily collect their winnings or launch their tournament without the hassle of gas fees. This is accomplished through our integration with Open GSN.
For those who want to dig into the nuts and bolts of the fix, we’ve visualized a quick walkthrough of the new experience (below).
Each tournament winner can now claim their prize directly to their CG-connect wallet or alternatively, claim prizing to any external wallet address.
Through Meta Transactions, players now have the option to claim winnings to an external wallet (e.g. A Coinbase or Binance wallet or gifting it to a friend) by entering in another address. Which can now be done without needing to have any native tokens in your wallet for a withdrawal transaction.
If players decide to claim prizes to their CG-link wallet, they’ll be taken to the ‘My Wallet’ page. With one simple click of the gold “Claim” button, all the player’s rewards are collected in their CG wallet.
Gasless transactions on BNB Chain Chain and Polygon enables organizers and players to create tournaments and claim prizing in a seamless fashion, allowing for instant payments at scale for mainstream gamers.
If you’re a grassroots organizer who wants to start creating your own blockchain-powered tournaments on our platform please fill out our application form and we’ll grant you access!
Author: Hayder Sharhan, Community Gaming’s Co-Founder & CTO
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