Bridge Champ and other musings

Let me start with a bit of a retrospective on the wonderful journey we had at Jelurida for the last 3 years starting from the Ardor mainnet launch.

As you know, our business plan and vision around Ardor is to create a single chain “to secure them all” as the consensus layer with many child chains serving as the decentralized application layer.

Learning from our vast experience with the Nxt project decentralized asset exchange, which while hosting some decent projects, served mostly as a launchpad for failed or scam projects, we decided that child chains will be created only by Jelurida based on a contractual agreement with the child chain issuer entity. Frankly, so far we did not attract enough developers to our platform. You see, we are operating in a very competitive market that only gets more competitive by the day, naturally developers are attracted to the platform with better network effect or higher marketing budgets and we need to work harder to carve our niche.

But enough with excuses.

Fast forward to August 2020 we had on one hand a perfectly working blockchain platform with most of the promised content already implemented and much more that was never promised like Contracts, HD wallet, Android full node and more. An engineering masterpiece I would dare to say. On the other hand we had few actual projects working on child chains or developing on our own permissionless child chain Ignis. We were clearly missing something.

My idea was that the missing piece is for us to develop our own dapp ourselves starting with the initial concept and business plan up to a state of the art production system to demonstrate how one can use the Ardor/Ignis ecosystem to create a profitable, regulatory compliant, legitimate business model that can be exponentially scaled in the future.

The idea for Bridge Champ was not envisioned by us but by Barak Lieberman a bridge player and trainer whom I met at the time who became our partner and consultant for this project. I used to play contract bridge as a teenager and learning from Barak about the challenges facing the online bridge players, and the industry as a whole got me thinking if there is a business opportunity here and it turned out that there is one!

In fact, the contract bridge use case ticks all the boxes for a dapp namely:

A large community of users (players) suffering from a stagnated ecosystem.

Many interesting use cases for token economy, such as in-game token, achievement registration, trophies and merchandise, 3rd party ecosystem integration, various cryptographic widgets, and tricks that can be later reused by follow-up projects.

Relatively mild regulatory risk due to not having to deal with financial instruments or gambling or other riskier applications.

Cool and fun project with lot’s of technical challenges like we computer geeks always like to work on.

And most of all, forcing us to think, plan and design how a real world production dapp should be architected. Knowledge that we can later externalize to our partners.

Fast forward 6 month and I’m happy to say that the project is in full swing. There are more than 5 developers working nearly full time and an experienced team composed of a product manager, marketing expert, designer and content creator dedicated to the project. Furthermore we increased the project scope quite a bit adding video/audio/chat integration, game bot integration, mobile app and of course the blockchain integration and a utility token. All this is based on an open API layer that 3rd party developers will be able to integrate with.

In fact Bridge Champ is shaping up to be a social network like site evolved around the game of contract bridge and a great use case for a utility token.

We are also working on the corporate structure, legal setup, contractual commitments there are so many aspects to consider.

The end result is shaping up to be one of greatest use cases for blockchain integration and token economy. A detailed roadmap will be uploaded soon to https://www.bridgechamp.com/ and meanwhile you can register to our newsletter for updates.

Exciting and historical times ahead!