Frontrunner

Market and rewards views on mobile
NFL Futures and orderbook views on mobile
Webapp view

Inspiration

The story of Frontrunner began in 2019 when I placed a $50 bet on the SF 49ers to win Super Bowl LIV at +4500 (45 to 1 odds) the day after Super Bowl LIII. As a fan who had spent every Sunday and countless other hours watching and analyzing the NFL season, I truly believed that they were undervalued, especially relative to the other long shots at similar odds. Fast forward 11 months and it turned out that I was right! The 49ers ended up making the Super Bowl and entered the final game of the season at +100 to win (basically even odds). My excitement about my bet had been building all season but I soon realized that despite my original thesis being correct, there wasn’t a good way to ensure that I profited from my original bet. My only options were to hedge by betting additional capital on the Chiefs to win or to sell my bet directly back to book at about 70% of its implied value.

This made me realize: despite the recent growth of online sports betting, the underlying sports betting format has remained mostly the same since the days of betting with your street corner bookie. Bettors are still unilaterally given prices (or odds) by their bookie and are essentially betting against their bookie; a relationship that disincentivizes bookies giving bettors ways to maximize the values of their bets.

As one of the many people who had learned to trade stocks, options, and crypto through consumer trading apps like Robinhood and Coinbase, this felt wrong. The idea that I could take an initial position but effectively not close it out when I wanted to went against everything I had learned trading in transparent and liquid markets. Sports fans, media personalities, and league analysts already talk about buying low and selling high on teams and players. Why can’t we make betting on sports feel more like actually trading on a stock or crypto exchange? How do we create fair and liquid sports betting markets that are fun and easy to use? There must be a better way to invest in our sports knowledge and beliefs.

What it does

Frontrunner is a decentralized sports prediction market where users can buy shares of sports propositions and trade them like they would on any other stock trading platform. Imagine having shares of the Yankees to win the World Series that can be freely bought and sold as they over or underperform over the course of the season rather than betting once and hoping for the best. Unlike traditional sportsbooks where users place a bet and wait, Frontrunner gives users full control over their portfolios, allowing them to dynamically shift their positions as the situations change and more information is presented to them.

In the end, we’re building Frontrunner to meet the needs of the modern sports fan and bettor. By leveraging the power of free markets and the blockchain, we create transparent markets and liquid positions to reduce counterparty risk, create new types of sports-related markets, and fundamentally change the way in which people invest in their sports knowledge and beliefs. Frontrunner is currently live on testnet and our mainnet launch is planned for 2023. I hope you all will come along with us as we build the next generation of sports engagement!

How we built it

On the engineering side, we built out both Android and iOS in tandem with React Native. We also built supporting backend services to pull data from both Injective and our sports data provider to automatically spin up (and resolve) markets and store users’ activity to display to them in the app. Hosting Injective nodes ourselves in AWS was important to reduce latency and maintain control of the Injective API layer.
Injective’s orderbook primitive is a critical building block - we were able to build our prediction markets without writing smart contracts, which enabled us to focus on product and UX. Injective generally provided a great platform to build on with 0 gas fees, high throughput, and secure orderbook execution.
We started with basic order submission functionality for simple binary markets, then we added non-binary markets including EPL (which additionally have Draw as an outcome) and futures. We also added in daily challenges to get people excited about playing every day.
We started with a design similar to the web-app for parity before redesigning with mobile functionality featured more prominently.

Challenges we ran into

Handling games that are postponed or canceled; unlike centralized sports betting platforms, we cannot reverse / void transactions, so dealing with canceled and postponed sports games forced us to create a different system for resolving these markets
Effective, live, in-game liquidity is a challenge that we are still working on. We are currently on a free plan from our odds provider and thus our market making is behind; signing on to a paid plan in the future would likely help with this
Maintaining Injective nodes in AWS is some additional burden, especially when there are chain upgrades to manage
We weren’t able to stream Injective updates in the mobile apps due to an underlying software library limitation

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Over 230,000 bets made by over 2600 users so far
$88M in testnet transaction volume since 2/22/23
Over 1000 mobile app downloads in the first month

What we learned

Users that interact with our leaderboard place around 30% more trades than users that never view the leaderboard; this shows that driving competition and rivalries is an important way to increase transaction numbers
Users become much more consistent daily users once they place their first sell order on a live game market; this is the "ah-ha" moment for a lot of our users
Simplifying wallet creation flow is essential to attracting normal sports fans / non-crypto native users; we have designed our onboarding flow to match traditional Web 2 onboarding as much as possible in an effort to reduce the time and effort needed to get to a user's first trade

What's next for Frontrunner

Working more on liquidity solutions and finding external market making partners / affiliates
Expansion and increased focus on social features and social betting to further drive engagement and platform virality
Integrations and work related to our Mainnet soft-launch (currently scheduled for mid July this year) including fiat on/off ramp and geofencing