SafeBets

Sports betting with none of the risk and more of the reward.

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Inspiration

As of 2025, 22% of Americans have an activate account on a sports betting app. To anyone who understands the probabilities that empower the casinos and bookies, this is scary. Gambling is not harmless fun, it ruins peoples lives.

But I don't think it's too late. What if users of sports betting apps could have just as much fun as they do on FanDuel, but on an app that is actually good for their finances?

Enter SafeBets.

What it does

Users of SafeBets, deposit money and receive tokens. With these tokens, users make bets on the outcomes of sports games. The catch is... the tokens cannot be withdrawn. So why would anyone play SafeBets over another sports betting app? Because SafeBets takes user's money and invests it in... well... safe bets. SafeBets isn't just a sports book, its an investment app that makes investing in boring safe assets as fun as gambling. When you deposit $100, you get 10,000 tokens to gamble with and you get $100 of inflation-proof appreciating assets. Its the fun parts of gambling, without the really really bad parts.

How we built it

SafeBets is built using React Native, a JavaScript/TypeScript framework for building cross platform native apps. The choice of React Native means that minimal work would be needed to port the app to iOS. I wrote all of the app code in Typescript and a small API in Python. Expo was used for rapid testing on my own Android phone and the Python server I wrote employed fastAPI and YFinance.

Challenges we ran into

I was entirely unfamiliar with React Native when I started this project. As a result it took me most of the first half of the competition to learn, and figure out how to develop in, this framework. If I had come into this hackathon knowing what I was doing, I think I could have added many more features.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Despite my lack of knowledge going in, I was able to produce a solid MVP demonstrating the viability of my idea. More than development though, I am proud of my idea. I feel this idea is a genuinely good idea for an app that many people would use, myself included.

What we learned

I learned how to use React Native and how to develop for mobile phones. More broadly, I learned that I can pick up a skill and create a proof-of-concept for an idea in just a few days.

What's next for SafeBets

I feel that SafeBets is a genuinely good idea. I am seriously considering continuing to work on this idea. If I do I will likely start from scratch. Hackathons are great, but time constraints aren't good for tech debt. And I am very willing to acknowledge that SafeBets has plenty of that tech debt. There are also many features I want to add. The biggest is a profile page that can be customized by purchasing items with tokens, providing a use for the tokens we are gambling for.

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