$RAGE Utility Series: Governance

There is one thing in the world which every rich man covets, a sports club. Many members of the billionaires’ club bid for sports teams each year, but even for the big-monied crowd, the dream has remained elusive. Sports clubs are famously secretive, closed and more difficult to penetrate than Fort Knox.

But where even the big money club has failed, fandom powered by the blockchain is succeeding. In fantasy sports, fandom is no longer only about clapping, roaring and waving. Owning and managing sports teams and therefore the factors that control team success is being made possible by bestowing fans with powerful governance rights.

Through the virtualization of real sports games, fans live vicariously through sports managers and coaches by creating their own teams. Fantasy sports players can mix and match players and skills to increase the probability of winning. But like in the real sports world, the owners call the big shots — such as how much the coaches, managers and players will get paid. If you don’t have the budget to recruit Manchester United FC striker Marcus Rashford to your soccer team or Jasprit Bumrah to your cricket squad, you have to settle for second-best draft picks, and fatefully likely more on luck than skill to win.

The fan-first Rage.Fan fantasy sports platform gives players the rights to make these all-important decisions themselves. Anyone who holds $RAGE, the native platform token, can both play and vote. $RAGE tokens are not only an exchange of value and utility but they also provide owners powerful governance privileges by serving as both the game currency token and community governance token.

Fantasy Sports Governance

Governance rights over the factors that determine how players monetize their fantasy sports experience are not inconsequential. In blockchain fantasy sports, most of the money goes to the platform users, the players, who share ownership rather than to one sports franchise owner like Chelsea FC owner Roman Abramovich or LA Clippers owner Steve Ballmer.

On the Rage.Fan platform, each token accumulates voting power for the token holder who participates in and actively contributes to decision making through community votes. The owners of $RAGE have voting rights equivalent to the ratio of $RAGE they hold to the total supply of tokens. If User A has 50 $RAGE and the total supply is 1,000 tokens, User A has 5 percent of the voting power (50/1000 = 5%).

As users come to appreciate the true value proposition of voting rights, governance tokens are becoming one of the most highly valued assets in the crypto market. They give holders a voice in shaping the future of a protocol, influencing everything from how a project functions and its features to its economic model and the very governance system itself. In addition to voting, holders can put forth proposals for votes.

Power

Fantasy sports players can vote on the factors that determine their ability to bring the best players on board to their teams. Through self-governance, fans decide on critical parameters such as the percent of the reward pool paid out, prize for each rank, participation fees, and so on.

Platform users — who propose, debate, and vote on protocol issues — could for example decide the number of points needed to buy top players. By voting to lower the points, the sports league becomes more democratic.

Provably Fair

Rage.Fan operates as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), whereby rules and game play are transparent and encoded in smart contracts on-chain. Provably fair algorithms are used to prevent machines or game operators from rigging the game and creating an uneven playing field. To this end, game play from choosing teams to money paid out by rank is fully transparent.

Monetization

Fantasy sports platforms on the blockchain are building fan-first experiences that do away with high entry and withdrawal fees yet small player payouts. Fees are low and revenues are shared. But how do you stop a big whale from scooping up the majority of tokens and therefore governance power and wielding too much power over the platform?

On the Rage.Fan platform, fans have many avenues to increase their token wealth and voting power, and thus their control over all the factors that contribute to their sports teams’ success increases.

Quizzes are a particularly powerful incentive alignment tool. In the current fantasy sports game model, a few top token holders dominate wins while other users have few avenues to gain more wealth and power through their skills and knowledge. Imagine the fate of NBA champions the Bulls and Lakers without Phil Jackson or the Packers in the NFL without Vince Lombardi. To level the playing field, Rage.Fan has designed mechanisms into its game play to develop a true meritocracy. One such mechanism is quizzes. Before, during and after games, players can earn points by demonstrating their knowledge and skills through quizzes.

Conclusion

To conclude, all of the above features create user empowerment, and empowerment is a key component of engagement. If a platform can engage players, users will come and play, and stay.

A sports club can only be fan-first if it is a meritocracy, transparent and self-governed. Through a well-designed governance system, Rage.Fan users can not only walk in the shoes of top sports managers but also the sports franchise owners through powerful governance rights that empower a fully fandom-driven platform.

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