Outplay

Inspiration

My name is Anastasia Smolik. I am a product manager in IT. Me and my husband Alexey (who works in IT too) love to play tennis. A couple of years ago we found out that there are amateur tennis competitions. It had never even crossed our minds that such a thing existed. We have enjoyed participating in several competitions. 


Last year we moved to Thailand and started looking for amateur tennis competitions on our island. Through social networks and WhatsApp, we found a person who was organizing such thing on the island. We became friends with this guy, and a few times my husband and I ran competitions ourselves instead of our new friend. (It's funny that this tournament organizer also works in IT and ended up joining our Outplay team)

This summer we went to Bali. As it turned out, despite the fact that there are many women playing tennis on Bali, there were no special women's competitions. And many female beginners were embarrassed to participate in competitions with men. So I’ve organized the women's tournament. It was a huge success, there were many participants (both locals and expats - a wonderful multicultural event) and it was a real feast for all the girls!

What it does

This experience gave us food for thought. Small tennis competitions do not bring income to the organizer, since all participant fees go to the organization of the tournament. Winners also receive only symbolic prizes. Plus not all amateur tennis athletes around the world have access to competitions. Realizing this, we came to the conclusion that we can do what many tennis fans around the world want.

Our application will allow those who play sports (tennis, volleyball, etc.) to receive rewards for their achievements. Thanks to the application, you can participate in competitions, find partners to play with anywhere in the world, check ratings of the players. Players can see their rating and progress, comment on each other's activity, post photos. As avid tennis players ourselves, we understand how exciting it can be to earn crypto assets for your performance in the sport using App. At the same time, we understand from our own experience that, along with the convenience and capabilities of a global platform, it is important for players to be in their own local community, within which they can socialize & compete with their friends in real life. In our App, we encourage to create such local communities, leagues and ratings, and hold competitions of various levels (local, between communities, global), in which players can win valuable prizes in the form of crypto assets. At the same time, to protect against abuse, only trusted platform participants can be community organizers. Organizers will be chosen by decentralized voting.

How we built

We developed both client (React) and backend (Node.js) code. We were using Minima blockchain (it allows user's mobile phone to mint tokens), but at the moment we've decided to change the blockchain to Ethereum, because we ran into some issues regarding Minima interaction.

Challenges we ran into

We have already worked through a lot, but we still have many problems to solve. It is necessary to think over the token economics of the project. I already have a certain idea, but it requires detailed elaboration. In addition, we must start working on the design of the application. There are still technical issues to be resolved. We need to think about how to protect the application from abuse. We should also think more thorough on how the application will create value. There are still many interesting tasks ahead, which I can not wait to solve!

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We came up with a really unusual idea that can unite crypto enthusiasts and people far from crypto. I'm proud that I managed to film a video for this submission :) I эe improved my ability to apply empathy while working on a software product. We've became one of the runner-ups of The Minima Innovation Challenge https://innovation.minima.global/

What we learned

We've learned about design thinking, video pitching and linking our ideas to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.

What's next for Outplay

Hopefully, incubation stage in GDC 2022. At the moment, the main priority is to change the blockchain to Ethereum. And we need to start working on the design of the application. We need to resolve the challenges we ran into.

Built With

• blockchain
• cjm
• customer-personas
• figma
• github
• node.js
• react