Introducing BetDEX — The Global Decentralized Sports Betting Protocol

Why we’re building BetDEX

Sports betting is an absolutely massive business, no one knows the exact number but estimates of global handle are over $1 trillion/year.

Yet consumers are still getting charged insanely high prices of 5%+ to place a simple wager — below is a screenshot I took of FanDuel’s margin for the Sharks/Wild game on 11/16/21.

Even more importantly, sports betting businesses have not competed on product in the last 20 years — why can you still not visually track the value of your bet in real-time? Why can’t you easily cash out? Why can’t you bet with your friends?

I started to dig into these questions with friends of mine — Nigel Eccles (former founder and CEO of FanDuel) and Stuart Tonner (first engineer at FanDuel). We realized that sport betting businesses have no incentives to innovate — U.S. sportsbooks are too focused on inefficiently gaining market share in a burgeoning industry with advertising dollars, while international organizations have an inherent liquidity moat that has been built up over the years. Product simply falls by the wayside, why invest in R&D when you have customers (even if they’re unhappy)?

However, what if there was a way to provide an open sourced sports betting infrastructure that is owned and operated by application developers and users? Would you want to spend time building innovative products on top of a platform which you enjoy using (and own a piece of) every day?

That’s the bet we’re making with BetDEX — we firmly believe that if we create an infrastructure layer which is owned and operated by entrepreneurial application developers as well as the very people who wager on the platform, incentives are aligned to compete based on product excellence and deliver truly delightful experiences for the consumer.

So what exactly is BetDEX?

Our vision is to create the global decentralized sports betting protocol.

BetDEX will be the premier back-end infrastructure for the sports betting market, think of this as a global clearinghouse for sports wagering. This protocol will be built on the Solana blockchain to allow for instantaneous transactions at a negligible cost to the consumer — the protocol will charge a fee of <1% on net winnings. In addition, we will open source the infrastructure and decentralize the protocol so it is controlled by the community — i.e. the actual builders and users of the platform.

By doing this, we believe that we will incubate and kickstart a movement to allow users to wager successfully with each other on a platform they are truly invested in and care about. Anything less is unacceptable for a market as large and fast growing as sports betting.

How we’ll fund BetDEX

Building a world class protocol like this is no small feat. To achieve our vision, it was important to us that we bring in investors who are highly experienced in blockchain technology and governance to complement our deep sports betting experience. We are proud to partner with crypto-investment firm Paradigm (just announced the largest ever crypto investment fund of $2.5bn) and cryptocurrency exchange FTX (recently valued at $25 billion) on a $21mm seed round to power the next generation of sports betting businesses.

What’s next?

We are moving fast to build a team of empathetic, intelligent and highly motivated individuals who share our vision of creating a truly decentralized wagering platform which is owned by the community and users. Open roles can be found here.

I honestly believe that opportunities like this may only come along once in a lifetime. Web3 is not a passing fad, it is here to stay. It’s already revolutionizing finance, the creator economy and gaming. Sports betting is next and it will be huge. If you want to seize this opportunity to not only shape a Company’s culture and product from the ground up, but also be part of this revolution, get in touch, we would love to hear from you.

For more information please visit our website at www.betdex.com