Virtue Poker

Virtue Poker February 2024 Update

Virtue Poker -

Hello Virtue Poker Community! It’s been awhile since we last gave a formal update, but we are going to re-launch our monthly update blog series to keep people up to date on our product, partnerships, roadmap and more. 

It’s been an awesome several months since we relaunched Virtue after a full year of a rebuild. But we are pleased to say things so far have been off to a fantastic start. 

Platform Performance 

Since our launch we have the following user growth

Most critically - in <4 months we already have more total users, daily active users, and monthly active users, then we reached in 3 years with our old application. 

  • Total Users: 17,000
  • Average Daily Active Users: 500 
  • Average Monthly Active Users: 6000 

And our website traffic has been steadily growing: 

We will have completed a series of SEO (search engine optimization) tasks already, and will continue to focus on improving our SEO to rank higher on search pages results for poker queries.  

Partners 

While we’ve been in our beta, Virtue has managed to partner with some of the top NFT, conference and media partners from across the web 3 ecosystem: 

  • NeoTokyo Bets4Bytes Club 
  • Pudgy Penguins Main Event Challenge 
  • ETHDenver Road to the Main Event 
  • Rug Radio Road to NFT Paris 
  • This Thing of Ours Holder Freeroll 
  • Decentral Games Ice Satellites and Crown/Speer Freeroll 
  • Gangster All-Stars Official Club 
  • The Kingdom 
  • Skult and Fooks Cross-over Event 

And we've just gotten started. We've set up an affiliate network with trusted partners to begin really ramping up community outreach and onboarding.

BTC Ordinals + BASE Chain Launch 

And we’re pleased to announce we added two new major networks to Virtue: BTC Ordinals and Coinbase’s Base-chain! 

Virtue Poker has established partnerships with communities within both ecosystems, and we will be launching partner clubs across both networks in the near future. 

Being a cross-chain compatible platform allows Virtue to partner with communities across the entire web3 ecosystem and this will continue to allow us to grow our footprint as the de-facto web3 community poker platform. 

Newly Added token-gating features 

On Virtue Poker you can now token-gate tournaments: 

  • A single asset (token or NFT) on a single network
  • Multiple assets (token or NFT) on a single network
  • Multiple assets (token or NFT) across up to 4 networks 
  • Require ownership of multiple assets (token and NFT) on single network
  • Require ownership of multiple assets (token and NFT) across multiple networks 
  • Require a user to transfer a specific amount of a token on a single network to a specified address to register 
  • (soon) Require a user to transfer a specific amount of a token on on multiple networks to a specified address to register 

In addition to these gating features we added: 

  • Tournament Whitelisting: Allows for a host to whitelist individual wallets for an event, even if they don’t own the required asset on-chain in their wallet 
  • Delegate.xyz Integration: This integration allows users to “Delegate” rights for a specified amount of tokens, or for their NFT to another wallet. For example, Virtue Poker delegated our Lil pudgy to a Virtue Player which allowed them to register for the first Pudgy Penguin event 

And Virtue is now compatible with the following L1 and L2 networks: 

  • Bitcoin
  • Ethereum
  • BSC Chain 
  • Solana 
  • Optimism, Arbitrum, Polygon, Base
  • (soon) Blast 

The sophistication of our gating options and the breadth of networks that we are compatible with allows a single, or multiple communities across-chains to all create or join a single token-gated event. 

And more importantly - it allows Virtue Poker to partner with really any community across the web3 ecosystem

And there is no other application in the market that does this. 

Additional Product Updates 

We slowed things down from a marketing/growth perspective during January/February to focus on improving the overall user experience of Virtue Poker. We felt this was critical to ensure that new partners who use the app have a positive first-user experience and become long term partners. 

Why do this? 

We learned from our previous mistakes in trying to scale a user base before the product was truly ready (anyone who played on our old application can fill you in). This is why we’ve been focused on things such as: 

UI/UX Improvement Features 

  • Mobile Optimization: eliminate the laggy experience when users play from mobile device 
  • Hand replayer improvement: default to previous hand, improved load speed 
  • My Position in Tournaments: tournament summary includes player position
  • Late Registration in Lobby: Allows players to know if a MTT has late registration 
  • Email Notifications: Allows players to be notified via email when a club posts a new table and gives a reminder 1 hour before a tournament starts 
  • On/Off Timebank: Allows players to use their timebank on demand instead of automatically (releasing this week)
  • Updated Design for Active/Inactive Players: makes the table interface more clear on who’s turn it currently is, who is folded, and who is sitting out 
  • Tournament Breakages Fix: solved issue behind MTTs breaking on tournament start 
  • Detect Timezone Automatically: displays all tournaments in users local timezone 
  • Add email/password to account: allows a user who originally registered with a wallet to add an email/password to their account so they can log-in on any device even if it doesn’t have their wallet address 
  • Enhanced Game Security Tooling: allows Virtue Poker to easily detect cheaters who are multi-accounting on the platform
  • Tournament Name and Description Displayed when shared via link: when a tournament is shared on social channels (or via text), the tournament name and description is displayed 
  • Custom Club Name URL: Each club’s URL includes the club name and can be updated
  • Chat Auto-Scroll to bottom: Makes chat more readable by auto-scrolling to the most recent message 
  • Increased Showdown Time: add time to showdown so that players don’t miss critical hands

These features individually may be small, but in aggregate create a much more positive user experience. And combining these improvements with advanced token-gating features and the overall unique experience that comes from being a web-application - we believe, makes our platform singularly unique in the market. 

At the end of the day, while many in the web3 space focus on more hype than substance, our vision with our pivot has always been to create an amazing poker experience first and foremost, and position ourselves in a unique position in the market. 

This also is why we are able to attract top-tier projects and more importantly retain our users and partners. 

It gives us the confidence to offer projects a freeroll tournament to get started, and know the majority of them will convert into clubs and long-term partners and users of the platform. 

Roadmap Ahead 

Improving the Architecture so we are “built-to-scale” 

Beyond these updates, our team is diligently “working-under the hood” in improving the overall software architecture to be able to scale both horizontally (more concurrent users on the site across tournaments/tables) and vertically (increasing the maximum players for an individual tournament). 

In addition, these architecture improvements will improve the latency of all web-communications to ensure that things like the occasional betting action not registering when time is expiring or pre-set button actions not registering - no longer happen. 

Adding New Features 

We will be working to integrate: 

  • Leaderboards inside individual clubs 
  • Improved multi-tabling experience 
  • Adding social profiles (twitter, discord and more) to individual profiles and allowing tournaments to be gated based on social traits/following/subscribes 
  • Tournament rebuys, and satellite structures 
  • Unions between clubs 
  • And much much more….

Web3 Features 

In addition we have a few amazing partnerships lined-up and after these integrations we will be able to: 

  • Automatically create a native wallet for all users, even if they register with an email address 
  • “Mint” your Club Badge as an NFT collection across any EVM network (for users who want to organize outside of an established community) 
  • Charge for membership on either a one-time or recurring basis 
  • Create and “Mint” NFT tickets you can sell for individual tournaments or a series of events 
  • Create an open API that allows on-chain data to be linked to chip balances inside individual clubs… 
  • “Stake-to-play”.... 
  • “Burn to enter”....
  • And much much more 

$VPP Tokenomics and Utility Upgrades 

If you skipped the rest of the blog post and scrolled down to just read this section: go to directly to jail, do not pass go and do not collect $200. 

But in all seriousness, we will provide a more detailed token economic breakdown with upgraded $VPP utility (See web3 features above to get some ideas of where we will be going) 

This will include: 

  • Token supply breakdown 
  • On-chain holder analysis 
  • Upgraded $VPP utility 
  • And finally more information regarding our plans to launch our NFT Poker Dog Avatars 

The good news is that, in short - all $VPP tokens for all purchasers/partners unlocked  > 2 years ago. 

And we don’t really have plans for insurance beyond our weekly $VPP prizes and via some smaller strategic partnerships who are only paid upon successful referral conversions of new partner clubs. 

Obviously things didn’t go according to plan with our original vision of Virtue. But the good news is that we don’t have constant unlocks, vesting, or other inflationary mechanisms that newer projects will most certainly have. 

Conclusion 

At the end of the day - our mission remains to build the world’s largest online poker community. Dominating the web3 ecosystem is just the first step on that journey. 

And we’ve just started scratching the surface of the potential of Virtue Poker. After we solidify referral network partners, begin promoting our platform to the broader web3 ecosystem, we will then focus back on attracting players from the web2 poker ecosystem. Through these combined markets, we anticipate reaching millions of users and becoming the world’s go-to poker platform.

We’re excited for the journey ahead, we hope you join us for the ride. 

The Virtue Poker Team