If you participated in the Beta 1, you already know why things have been quiet around here. The Beta 1 was a huge success, during which we gave away over 120 ETH, dealt over 100,000 hands and had over 1,000 players play.
The Beta 1 was the first time we invited players from outside of Virtue Poker and ‘friends of the company.’ All of our Alpha releases were provided exclusively to our token buyers, who did a terrific job of helping us vet many early issues. This time, we had a much larger audience and a lot more promotions to manage.
We were very pleased with the performance of the Beta 1. This release was particularly important to us because it included major updates to the Justice System, improving stability and performance. The Justice System is one of the foundational elements of the Virtue Poker system, ensuring that the critical distributed shuffling element of our system works without issue. The Beta 1 was a production-level test of this crucial element, and we are happy to say that it worked almost as expected — ‘almost’ because software never works as expected. This release incorporates the final architecture of the Virtue Poker system and sidechain, which yielded significant improvements in speed and stability.
The Beta 2 release is nearing the end of development. We are still working on the final release, but we’re thrilled to announce that this release will include Sit & Go tournaments for all three of our available games. It will be another two weeks before we will have a clear sense of ship dates — we will post another update as soon as we have some clarity here. We can tell you, though, that there will be a number of new promotions, including a Sit & Go weekly league, a cash game weekly league, Bust-a-Host tables and a lot more. When we do our next update, we will publish the full schedule of Beta 2 promotions. There will be at least 100 ETH up for grabs!
Call for Beta participants
Do you want to join us for the Virtue Poker Beta Program? Over the course of the Beta, you’ll have a chance to win your share of ETH and other great prizes that we’re giving away. Click here to sign up [this is no longer active] and we’ll contact you with details on joining. If you bought tokens in our Token Sale, or if you participated in earlier test rounds, there is no need to sign up, as we will be in touch.
Note: if you haven’t already done so, we strongly suggest that you whitelist the Virtue Poker domain so you don’t miss any emails from us. The Beta 2 announcement email and other Beta announcements will come from beta@virtue.poker.
Development Update
The Dev Team has focused most of their efforts on completing feature sets for the Beta 2 release. The most critical piece of the Beta 2 release is the introduction of Sit & Go tournaments. This is a key area for us, as it is our first introduction of tournaments and provides the foundation for multi-table tournaments, as well (which we expect in the Beta 3 release).
The Game Security team has been working on improving our anti-money laundering (AML) systems, with a focus on greater granularity in our tracking of mainnet and sidechain transactions. We have also made improvements in tracking of player connections and wallet interactions, to align with requirements for the gaming license application process and audit. We have invested significantly in our analysis tool suite, allowing us to introduce greater automation in our collusion detection and reporting measures. Lastly, we have also been working diligently on fixing the issues found during our beta testing, to ensure a high level of reliability and integrity in our event tracking.
We have added two new members of the Dev Team — Miguel Angel Alvarez has joined us as a Senior Platform Developer and Jose Ignacio as a QA Automation Engineer, and have two more developers joining the team in the next month.
Regulatory update
Our application for a license in Malta is under consideration, and if granted it will be the first online gaming license ever granted to a blockchain gaming company. We are working together with the Malta regulators, as this is new territory for them, also. We fully expect that this license will be granted prior to our launch on the Ethereum mainnet.
Marketing update
The Virtue Poker marketing team has been working on promotions for the Beta 2 release. We’re excited to introduce these — there is a much wider variety of promotions, including both ring (cash) games and Sit & Go tournaments. Stay tuned for details.
We are also getting ready for the company’s participation in the Ethereal Summit Tel Aviv in September and Ethereum DevCon Osaka in October. If you will be attending either of these conferences, please make sure to come find us — we’d love to meet you in person.
Conclusion
The Beta 1 provided us with much-needed feedback directly from our players, which we are incorporating into the Beta 2 and other future releases. Now that we have confidence that the system scales as expected, the next release will focus on the critical features we need for launch. We know it’s been a long road, and we appreciate you traveling it with us.