♠️ 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.