A Colosseum for Nihilists
Colosseum (n): an ancient Roman arena where gladiators fight for life and death as a public spectacle — the victor redeems his honour, proving worthy of his unmerited gift of life.
Nihilists (n): individuals who have resigned to their lack of upward mobility, taking an all-or-nothing view to financial success in life.
Gambling: a pastime as old as time
We humans sure love to bet. Fully knowing that betting is a loss-making gambit in the long run, we nonetheless submit to our primal urges, putting your money to where your proverbial mouth is.
Peasants and aristocrats alike, we all indulge in some form of gambling one way or another. While the societal high-class engage in the pastime atop of their glittered ivory towers, peasants and the average Joes retreat to their humble dens to “shoot their shot” amongst peers of the same strata.
The above still holds true in the modern world. The haves with unfettered access to the global financial system, gamble away in the streets of Las Vegas and Macau. For the sports aficionados, licensed sports betting sites like bet365 / DraftKings happily roll up their sleeves to serve their gambling needs. But for the have-nots unlucky enough to live under a nanny-state, these avenues that the Western world has taken for granted, seemed so close yet so far.
Close to a third of the world population reside in countries where gambling exists in a grey area (or is straight-up illegal and persecuted).
On paper, everything seems all rosy: their citizens will stay away from the sin of gambling, and lead a life guided by moral principles. In reality though, these restrictions only drove people towards non-licensed online operators to do their “deed”, in which not only they get markedly worse odds and pay more in fees, they are multiple times more likely to be a victim of fraud or scams as a result of dealing with these preying shady operators.
The age of financial nihilism
Fueled by social media, the inclination of humans to “one up each other” becomes a global spectacle for the digital town hall to witness. 100x levered punts on memecoins, 10-game parlays, etc. — everyone is looking for that “one shot to glory”, aka the theory of financial nihilism.
Central to financial nihilism, is the lack of upward mobility that is afforded to young people of the present day.
For better or worse, the evidence shows: record-on-record numbers for the online gambling industry during the past few years, and the sky is still the limit!
The demand for gambling amongst financial nihilists is insatiable, so much so that people in restrictive jurisdictions are willing to trust third-party contacts or jump through hoops just to gamble on an unlicensed sketchy site where your money can go poof at any moment.
Don’t buck the trend: if financial nihilism is inevitable, then we might as well have the best version of it!
Azuro: permissionless, non-custodial, no limits
Crypto is the great global equalizer. No matter who you are or where you’re from, all you need is an internet-connected device to be your own wealth custodian. No background checks, salary slips, or proof of residence necessary — setup your wallet, and you’re ready to go!
Where other betting sites (even your so-called “crypto-native” betting operators) enforce mandatory KYC and acts as a custodian to your deposited funds, Azuro fully preserves the core tenets of crypto and takes the opposite approach: all you need to do is to connect your wallet to the front-end, and you’re set.
Permissionless, non-custodial, no limits — bet to your heart’s content!
The Liquidity Tree: one LP for all markets
Azuro’s peer-to-pool “Liquidity Tree” model consolidates all liquidity into a single pool, acting as the counterparty to all bets placed on Azuro contracts. It allows Azuro to facilitate high-value bets with minimal slippage, as the full weight of a single LP can be thrown to support a singular bet if necessary (albeit with predefined limits to prevent LP ruin).
This approach differs from the capital-inefficient peer-to-peer model (where liquidity is siloed per market) used by virtually all of Azuro’s industry peers. At the time of writing, Azuro is the only protocol that employs a peer-to-pool model to serve each of its betting markets.
Azuro elegantly iterates upon the tried-and-tested “house liquidity” model used by traditional betting operators, implementing it as a set of smart contracts deployed to a public blockchain. Anyone can contribute their capital and be an Azuro LP, essentially partaking as a member of the Azuro decentralized house. LPers are entitled to a share of profits generated from Azuro’s “house edge”, in exchange for weathering out the volatility owed to the variability of betting outcomes.
Separation of concerns: the protocol and the “app”
Azuro is not a betting site, nor a company. Azuro is merely a moniker for the set of deployed smart contracts that anyone can interact with. People interface with Azuro in various ways — skilled developers may choose to build their own front-end locally, while the rest of us mere mortals may opt to rely on front-ends operated by third parties.
This “separation of concerns” bodes well for the going-concern of Azuro. By disassociating the front-end from the contracts, Azuro avoids pesky meatspace headaches — each front-end operator is responsible (if they choose to) for obtaining the relevant licenses, dealing with authorities of the jurisdictions they intend to serve, and doing the marketing campaigns to attract bettors to their front-end. In exchange for their hard work, front-ends are entitled to a mammoth 60% (at time of writing) of house profits generated from bets submitted through their site.
Since front-ends do not custody user funds (they are merely “pointers” to Azuro contracts on the public blockchain), they will be judged solely by their quality of service. In Azuro-land, bettors don’t deposit/withdraw funds to/from a front-end — they simply take their onchain funds and place bets directly on Azuro contracts via the front-end. All front-ends source the same odds and interact with the same set of contracts — the only differentiation point lies in the user interface and experience that each can bring to the table.
Lesson in there: when in doubt, the free market is your friend. Don’t take my word for it — nowhere else will you find a better collection of front-ends feeding off from the same protocol, all competing to satisfy your betting needs.
Prefer a tried-and-tested “boomer” front-end? Bookmaker is where you’re at. You want a front-end for degens with generous cashbacks on your losses? Try GambleFukkers. Gasless betting under an integrated wallet experience? DexWin is there for you. Heck, what if you’re too lazy to do any of the above? Look no further than BoxBet, where you can bet straight from the Telegram app!
Less intermediaries, less overhead, lower vigs!
For Azuro to remain “operational”, it essentially only needs a front-end operator (which can range from a single savvy individual to a global remote-first team). Upon deployment, Azuro contracts essentially require no further human intervention (except for upgrades, in which it will no longer be the case once Azuro reaches steady-state and admin keys are relinquished) — Azuro contracts will continue to run autonomously so long as the blockchain continues producing blocks.
In contrast to custodial betting houses, there’s the overhead of developing and maintaining the infrastructure needed to custody user funds (and invest in security practices for hack or breach prevention). Surprisingly it seems, that when you do away with less intermediaries and less overhead, you’ll be able to offer the lowest vigs (”house edge”) on the market!
Don’t hate the player, hate the game
“The idea that cost of living is strangling most Americans; that upward mobility opportunity is out of reach for increasingly more people; and that median home prices divided by median income is at a completely untenable level.
So why not put $500 into a memecoin that could 50x, knowing that you could likely lose most or all of it? It’s not like the $500 is enough to make any difference anyways. Neither is $1k or $5k.
That mindset, which is becoming pervasive in America, is financial nihilism.”
— Travis Kling
If financial nihilism becomes an increasingly likely reality that all of us must bear witness to, the best we can do is to make the game the best version of what it can be. If Americans are given the “privilege” of placing a 10-game parlay on a licensed reputable operator like DraftKings, it would be anything but fair if a third of the world population do not have the same ability to do so.
In the age of social media and the internet, a restrict-first and ban-first approach on online goods and services just won’t work. Doing so will only encourage the proliferation of black underground markets, which presents a worse outcome for everyone had the government respect individual liberty and just let the free market run its course. Meaning to say, banning online gambling will only lead to people resorting to shady operators that could run with their money at any moment.
Azuro presents a much better alternative to these opaque black market gambling dens — a permissionless and self-custodial platform where people retain full agency over their funds, and their identity. An internet-connected device, some spare change, and game-set-match — no questions asked.
Now what does the charts say? Upwards, and to the right!
Azuro is the infrastructure/liquidity layer enabling arbitrary peer-to-pool odds markets without intermediaries.
The protocol is built on top of LiquidityTree, a novel hybrid oracle and automated market maker (AMM) liquidity pool design that underpins Azuro’s onchain markets — from liquidity provision and oddsmaking, to managing event conditions and prediction payouts.
With modular plug-and-play components plus a rich feature set, the AzuroSDK makes it easy for developers to build fully onchain yet user-friendly prediction apps with zero upfront or running costs.
