SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
BetterBetting is two weeks into a soft launch period for its World Cup app, produced in record time after the introduction of the BETR token to coincide with the tournament’s kick off on 14 June.
The unique blockchain-based decentralised peer-to-peer sports betting system provides a mechanism for two parties to bet with one another on the blockchain with secure contracts.
Ethereum contracts are key to the system, as they escrow funds from both parties and hold them until settlement. All bets are placed and settled using the BETR token, released in an initial token offering, that is currently trading and available for purchase on major exchanges such as HitBTC, Bancor, IDEX, Etherdelta, Bisq and Waves.
BetterBetting CEO Adriaan Brink said: “The World Cup is a great event to test our first release. We have had a very positive response and look forward to increased usage over the coming weeks.”
“The team has worked incredibly hard to produce this technology in the time scale we set post our successful ICO,” he added. “Further releases will feature improved user interfaces, functionality and user experience.
“They will include main football leagues in time for the 2018/19 season, including the English Premier League, Spanish Primera Liga and the German Bundesliga. We intend to add sports in accordance with user feedback and demand so there may well be additional sports even before the European football season starts.”
The company has deployed several products to facilitate this Blockchain betting. The first instance of a BetterBetting Node (BBN), which manages the dissemination of odds and provides APIs to power independent user apps, a BETR Wallet making it easy to store and use BETR tokens, and an Android App that uses the BBN APIs to expose a simple odds selection interface.
The first BBN, which allows anyone to create an account and lay bets, was created specifically for the World Cup, but ultimately there will be many of these communicating with one another.
Users can lay bets on all the World Cup games with an extensive set of markets to choose from. All markets are available with reference pricing derived in real time from bookmakers, while users can tweak their odds pricing above or below the market in order to offer bets with lower or higher margin.
“This is the first release and was produced in record time after the ICO,” Brink concluded. “It is only the start and there are many iterations and improvements to come as the product is expanded and becomes more mainstream in functionality. We have a great team behind us and we are confident the success of this project will continue.”
The app’s BETR wallet is a standard ether wallet that holds a bettor’s funds and exposes the API that provides signing and execution of Ethereum contract calls against the user’s account. This provides an in-app experience for any contract execution not limited to interactions with the BETR token. The odds apps have no access to wallet information or funds.
