♠️ Decentralized Betting

Today's Highlights

• Azuro - democratizing the betting industry
• This Week On BuzzBelow - a recap on this week's topics.
• In Other News - a few interesting developments we're tracking.

Azuro - democratizing the betting industry

Betting today is broken and is built on negative incentives that put the bookmakers and players at odds with each other. It is common in the betting industry for players to be treated unfairly by having their accounts restricted or winnings withheld for winning too often. Bookmakers go to great lengths to ensure they have the upper hand over the players and use extensive cumbersome KYC procedures in an attempt to delay or refuse large withdrawals. With no single overarching governing body to protect the players, they are often left without a solution and often have to reach out to 3rd party mediators for dispute resolution.

Azuro aims to decentralize and democratize the betting industry. The use of smart contracts creates a level playing field for both players and bookmakers and allows for a trustless, transparent, and permissionless betting experience that is simply not possible in web2.

Azuro took inspiration from the AMM architecture used by DEXs (such as UniSwap) and adopted their peer-to-pool approach. This design can scale easily and allow for virtually an unlimited amount of liquid betting markets at any point in time.

One of the main problems of previous Web3 prediction markets’ was the lack of traditional betting features such as multipliers/parlays which allow players to add multiple bets to one slip for a larger return. These are one of the most popular types of bets in traditional betting, and other solutions have failed to provide them. The current betting UX on prediction markets is much closer to trading than it is to sports betting, where players buy fungible ERC-20 tokens representative of certain outcomes and sell them to realize a profit/loss depending on the result. This of course is not the desired UX and Azuro will use NFTs to provide critical features like accumulator/parlay bets and multiple outcome bets.        

Azuro has raised a total of $7.5M in funding. Paruyr Shahbazyan is the co-founder of Azuro.

This Week on BuzzBelow

💰 Loans in Web3

How Altitude automatically manages DeFi loans

BuzzBelowSukanya Ganesh

🛩 AI-Powered Flight

explaining Shield AI and its ‘Hivemind’ drone

BuzzBelowSrijan Bijjam

💴 Automated Crypto Taxes

How KoinX makes crypto taxes easy for investors

BuzzBelowSukanya Ganesh

📸 AI-powered Surveillance

Spot.ai aims to create more optimized organizations through AI camera systems.

BuzzBelowSrijan Bijjam

In Other News

Three Arrows Capital Founders Launch Exchange Where You Can Trade 3AC Bankruptcy Claims

Named Open Exchange, the platform aims to be a home for trading what it says is a $20 billion market of claims against bankrupt crypto firms, including those of 3AC.

CoinDeskStephen Alpher

LocalBitcoins closes down P2P crypto exchange service

Finland-based P2P cryptocurrency platform LocalBitcoins is shutting down operations after serving its customers for more than 10 years.

CointelegraphHelen Partz

First Mover Asia: Kraken Crypto Staking Settlement Bedevils Markets as Bitcoin Lingers Below $21.9K

ALSO: CoinDesk analyst Glenn Williams considers the significance of “whales” sending bitcoin back to exchanges, while smaller investors remove it.

CoinDeskJames Rubin and Glenn Williams