AverBet — Transforming Betting Through the Blockchain
This week’s edition of Project Serum’s Twitter Space series focuses on AverBet. AverBet is using the Solana blockchain to provide an orderbook-based betting platform to crypto users. In this chat we discuss how AverBet is filling a need in the crypto market to facilitate trustless betting between market participants.
It’s important to note — AverBet doesn’t take any bets. They are pioneering a trustless betting system that improves the exchange between punters, traders, market makers, and bots to allow for betting, but don’t personally take any bets.
So, for the audience that are not familiar with Aver, tell us about Aver. What are you guys working on?
So, the one-liner is Aver is the first fully decentralized peer-to-peer betting platform. Mostly everything will be done by smart contracts on the blockchain, but where we’re most unique is in the peer-to-peer aspect.
We’re going to be using Serum for our orderbooks and, thus far, a lot of players in the space haven’t used orderbook technology for this type of application yet. So, we plan to be the first peer-to-peer orderbook-based lending protocol.
We’re a lot more than sports betting. The platform is kind of “agnostic” and covers a wide range of risks. Users will be able to speculate in non-traditional markets like NFT floor prices and crypto stock prices. Even betting on something like a virtual coin flip is possible with Aver.
What problem with the traditional betting platforms do you think Aver solved?
The problem we’re trying to solve is manyfold. There are a number of problems with Web2 betting platforms.
One of them you might talk about is massive fragmentation across the market. There are a number of traditional exchanges but there are hundreds, if not thousands of bookmakers throughout the world. And you could think of each one of those bookmakers as its own fragmented market with a single half of the orderbook.
What that leads to is very poor price transparency and very poor prices. In some cases, users are paying an implicit fee of 10% to 30% to a bookmaker. Slightly less to an exchange, but still quite a significant cost.
Although we’re decentralized, we’d still like to eventually see universal pools of liquidity that would do a lot to drive the cost down for everyone and make much more efficient, competitive markets.
Another one we’d like to focus on is custody of funds. With most Web2 betting platforms it can take 24–48 hours to get your funds in. And the same if not longer to get your funds out.
Aver is completely non-custodial. Your money is always yours. We never hold it. It’s either in your wallet or tied up in a trade or bet at a particular time. This is what allows our users to place bets in a way that’s fully trustless. As a result, there’s no impediment to any of your funds. It’s a major plus for anyone who trades across multiple platforms or exchanges.
Also, there’s no central party to accept or reject your trade. Anyone who’s been a profitable gambler eventually reaches a point where they’ve been rejected by bookmakers. If you keep taking money from them, they tend to want to “cut off your flow” and your business which could be a frustrating experience.
The fact that we’re peer-to-peer means that we’re happy to help people at any stage. We’re not going to reject anybody just because they happen to be good at what they’re trying to do.
The last point I’d like to make is around the decentralization of information. You don’t just have to trust that the outcome of a particular sports match is what we said it was. We democratize and decentralize that resolution.
We’ll have a network of nodes that will be feeding off multiple different third-party feeds to determine what actually happened in a particular event. And there have been examples throughout history where particular sports outcomes have been disputed by a central party to the detriment of punters and people trading on platforms.
Also, with regard to the distribution of information, many of these exchanges limit the access to data — data from trades, data from volumes, and so on. Everything on Aver will be entirely open. Anyone can see it, anyone can audit, and you can access the data at any time. This feature won’t just be available to big players or parties that are on good books or bad books. It’s an entirely open platform that anyone can integrate with.
How do you guys integrate with Serum?
It’s something that’s fundamental to what we do. Each outcome of a particular sporting event, or particular team involved, becomes its own orderbook. Sports betting platforms then become a highly-correlated network of all of those individual orderbooks.
An Aver market would be “N” number of different orderbooks all working in a way that’s related. The position of each of those orderbooks needs to be consistently held and maintained. It’s a really interesting technical problem and it’s really pushing the boundaries of what we’ve come across. So, essentially, an Aver market is a multi-dimensional series of Serum orderbooks.
Serum Protocols Continue to Beat the Odds
Yet another insightful Twitter Spaces conversation has come and gone. And, as usual, it’s an inspiration to hear from the brilliant minds turning to Serum to support the groundbreaking, breathtaking, and innovative things they’re doing in the crypto space.
Learn more about AverBet and how they’re intelligently integrating the best of Serum and Solana to revolutionize online betting platforms. Watch the YouTube video or check out the full TwitterSpace interview for an in-depth look at their process and future plans.
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