Inspiration
We believe the sports betting industry is ripe for disruption, and the only reason it’s persisted in its current state for so long is due to a regulatory moat. The betting market should trade like how other major financial markets trade- Peer to Peer, orderbook style. Millions of bettors should not have to bet with the same handful of sportsbooks and pay a 5-10% vig, rather they should be able to bet with each other and in aggregate save billions of dollars every year. In addition to bad execution prices, the user experience is also poor, as the odds conventions are not standard depending on geography, and unintuitive. Our vision is to create an experience that’s a Robinhood trading like experience but for sports betting. Solana emerging as a high throughput blockchain, and Serum being the composable primitive that allows for a traditional markets style matching engine on chain allowed for the possibility for our vision. Other chains do not have high enough throughput to support an orderbook style dex, and AMMs are not suitable for prediction markets since liquidity will never be deep since it’s hard to compensate an LP to provide a choice market for contracts that settle to binary outcomes.
What it does
SportsDex is a prediction market with a focus on sports that is built on Serum. It allows users to place limit order sports bets and matches orders that cross.
How we built it
SportsDex uses a simple React web app in order to list available games and directory users to make bets. Bets are matched using Serum's asset agnostic order book, and are resolved by pulling in data from switchboard.
Challenges we ran into
Lack of documentation and open source code.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We’re proud of being early builders in an innovative space. No one has launched an orderbook based betting platform on mainnet yet. Also, we’re amongst the first builders utilizing the new Serum Core or the Asset Agnostic Orderbook. For early builders in a space, documentation is a bit lacking, so we’re proud of navigating this process.
What we learned
What's next for SportsDex
We are going to create a python API, so that market makers are able to provide tight liquidity, and prioritize creating a user friendly mobile UI, taking advantage of phantom wallet’s mobile launch.
Elevator Pitch (< 200 words)
SportsDex is the future of Sports Betting- A robinhood like experience for sports betting built on Solana. Gone are the days of 5-10% vig, a poor user experience, and having your bets rejected if you’re a profitable bettor. SportsDex will use an implied probability convention for betting, allowing easy charting and orders to be intuitively placed. Liquidity all over the world will be aggregated and users will be able to trade with each other, allowing the best possible odds on their bets, and no vig. The experience will be elevated as low execution cost allows smart bettors to be profitable sports traders. Bettors will be able to trade in and out instead of traditionally holding the risk until the outcome of the event, and all betting markets will turn into a live betting market as the event begins.
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