DreamTeam

DreamTeam was an esports platform where players and teams found each other, organized, and got paid. A token sat under the economy. I joined in 2018 and ran the blockchain and backend side for about two years.

The contract work itself, token vesting for teams, was the easy part. Keys were harder. The platform signs payouts all day with no human around, so the private keys have to be online, and keys that live on an app server eventually end up somewhere they shouldn’t. HashiCorp Vault fixed that for us. Storage and signing moved in there, services asked Vault for signatures, and nothing outside of it ever saw a key.

Then payments. We were on a third-party aggregator that kept lagging, which is a bad look when your whole pitch is players getting paid on time, so I replaced it with our own layer over PayPal, Stripe, and crypto. More work up front, sure. But when it broke we could fix it ourselves instead of waiting on someone else’s support queue.

Funny enough, the thing I still bring up from DreamTeam isn’t blockchain at all. It’s the Counter-Strike replay viewer. CS:GO demo files get up to 700MB, we parsed over 100 at once, and the analytics on top were almost trivial compared to keeping that pipeline alive.

Oh, and we won the ENS prize at ETHCapeTown along the way.