Betting Disrupting a Massive Incumbent Industry On Chain - Rossen Yordanov (Azuro Protocol)

hi my name is rossen i'm very happy to be here i'm actually also happy that it's the first session in the morning because i can pretend to be one of the cool kids like on twitter and say gm good morning to everyone um why why am i here um can i ask you like has anybody ever placed a bet like bet on a sporting event like can we do a raise of hands or okay that's a great start so i'm here because betting today is broken and why can i be so sure about this well i worked for the most part of my career in a global payments company which specialized in high risk payments we called it gambling betting adults gaming and so forth and i spent nearly 12 years there and uh it was i was part of a a division which is a digital wallet so imagine like uh the paypal of betting the most popular wallet in the in the betting sphere for for gamblers and betters and uh what we saw in that business on a daily basis really is that our customers would complain about things like later decline payouts uh account limitations actually that's a pretty tricky one bookmakers don't want players to be consistently making money okay bookmakers don't want to have players who are not losing over time this is a something that i never never really felt okay with it i thought it's very hypocritical you know like you win then you take your money you lose obviously they take your money but it's a standard in the industry that uh if you are winning consistently then you're rooted out you know like uh you're pushed out and uh you cannot bet anymore um and we had a very interesting business because we had the relationship both with the with the bookmakers direct relationships so virtually any bookmaker in the world actually we we serviced and we had the direct leadership with the players the betters themselves so we could see all the inefficiencies that were happening in that industry um lack of trust lack of transparency very often lack of fairness as well so it is a rivalry really between the bookmakers and the players of the world today mind you bookmakers were not happy about it as well they complained about people opening up multiple accounts bonus hunting basically taking their bonuses with many accounts they were unhappy as well about the payment costs we were a payment company i can tell you for sure actually it's pretty crazy um payments can go uh up to ten percent uh for um for uh forbidding companies for some of the payment options which is like if you compare it virtually with any industry in the world this is this is absolutely absolutely crazy uh ten percent for getting a deposit uh to the platform uh this is this is very very very high um and of course you know like in history and online betting as well you've had bookmakers that had the liquidity problems uh they ran out of business because they didn't have enough money to take bets from people and to settle the bets so um overall uh i would say a very inefficient industry that can be can be improved but that's that's my story you know like and then 2017 i started like uh i went into the ico craze uh i made some money lost it all uh and you know like as the cliche goes uh came in for the money state for the tech so i continued to follow the space uh and uh and um yeah over time you know like last two to three years particularly my excitement about what decentralization what smart contracts uh what the webtree can do really for many industries and for uh well for my industry which was the betting industry as well and for people as a whole grew and grew and grew and and that's kind of kind of how i got into this um our ceo of the project that i'm going to tell you about today also co-founder like myself uh had a different story he was a professional better himself he had these problems okay and at certain point he said okay that's enough uh i'm going to start a business and he started a business which is aimed at alleviating the pressure between bookmakers and players that business grew and it's now the biggest sports betting media company in eastern europe also growing globally more than 300 people very successful business which is aimed particularly at the problem that there is no trust and no transparency between bookmakers and players currently in the world but he also thought like okay that is what my business is built around but this problem is solvable it is solvable on chain it is solvable via smart contracts and if it is solvable then it will be solved right and if it is solved then the business is getting out of business right so he thought okay well i mean maybe we can be at the forefront of that disruption and this brings us to the next reason why i'm here today we looked at what's happening currently in the world so if it is a problem that can be solved uh is it being solved uh what's happening right now and i can tell you we know that uh that uh crypto as a payment method okay cryptocurrency being used by people to deposit and place bets is growing massively uh we know this we see this uh it's going to continue but this is not about this right this is about decentralized betting how betting can happen in a new way improved way better for the ecosystem and better for for for the players so we looked at what's happening on chain and uh the reality is that there are there are actually steps in the right direction but they are not nearly as far as they would need to be if we were to solve the problem of sports betting in particular but also betting in general uh you might know you know like some of the some of the projects that are here on the slide there's others as well and we looked at kind of like everything and the thing which is closest to to kind of like the first step in in solving the problem in a decentralized way is prediction markets but prediction markets today they do not work it is very very clear if you if you see that there is no markets for sports events there is no liquidity uh and therefore there is no betting what is actually like common for all these projects and there is lack of betting understanding they do not understand what bettors actually need and therefore that pronounces itself in a couple of problems and i think i would i would argue that you know like this this project's never attempted to uh to solve the problem of sports betting in the world at all so what we have is um no liquidity well big reason for that is because the liquidity providers have to create the events so if i'm a liquidity provider in prediction markets i need to go and say okay guys i'm going to take bets now for money united versus liverpool this uh this weekend for example and obviously i need to provide liquidity for this event i need to get the tokens for both of the outcomes right and i carry back ingress myself as a liquidity provider i am forced to be a better as well if i do it in prediction markets and therefore it's massively inefficient and uh there's no markets so that's a big problem by itself but there's another problem as well the user experience is nothing close to what bettors expect it is clunky there is no odds there is no three outcomes of an event you know like win draw lose there is no bets like which are like accumulators they are called in traditional betting so many bets in one and the same slip all of this is not is not happening there so this is another problem which by itself is big enough for this to never like kick off in terms of sports betting but uh uh but yeah it is it is definitely there so you can definitely understand that why why i'm here really is because we think that we can do this um we are building azuro which is a global decentralized betting protocol what a zuro does is it delivers trustless betting with a classic user experience so in that environment and on azure essentially you have no problems from the current traditional betting world so for example payouts are instant we take no custody of betters funds you know like this is uh this is in crypto wallet so you don't have to do this you don't do this and it's actually much better that you don't do this there's no account limitations there's no like limitations of spark bettors accounts and so forth so essentially the issues with trust and transparency and the lack of fairness in the traditional industry they go away but also obviously we need to have liquid markets we need to have plentiful events you know like people expect to be able to make plenty of bets on a particular match you know man united versus liverpool again you know um how many goals are going to be the match who's going to score who's going to win who's going to lose he's going to be a draw you know first half second half and so forth and so forth this is extremely important and of course competitive odds all of this is happening on azure now but this is not really i mean this is big but this is not the most exciting thing really for me particularly because there's other things that that can happen and uh it's a word that probably you'll be very surprised about but the word is nfts um through nfts essentially each bet made on azure can be minted as an nft as a standard what this means is like for example i placed a bet now on manu versus liverpool this weekend and then i realized cristiano ronaldo is not going to play that means that i can take my bet put it on the secondary marketplace and i can sell my bet possibly at a discount but i can sell my bet to somebody who is willing to take this bet in traditional betting this is a big big part of the of the betting sphere and it's called a cash out okay totally possible through nfts on the protocol but beyond that we can do now things that are possible only because of this technology and they were never part of the betting industry and the betting experience before and totally enrich the experience that the people can have so imagine the following we have a sports betting media company we know what people most care about what people most care about what gets the most eyeballs the articles that are being read and interacted and commented by most people is like awkward losses like somebody placed a bet on 20 events and they got 19 and the the 20th you know like tough luck you know and people are carrying like people care about this then somebody you know like made a lot of money from a very little money and people are like obviously crazy about it so imagine you know if you follow sport you would know about the hand of god goal by diego maradona in the world cup final against against england imagine if you had a bet on this event and you lost a lot of money or you won a lot of money because of that hand of god goal that maradona scored then your bet has life after death as a collectible and this is only possible because of nfts and because of how technology can actually disrupt and add to the experience of of betters in the world this is not just all fluffy talk and and ros rose tinted glasses we have an mvp of course it's very very early days but um it's live it's live for a month and a half now we have already more than 300 000 bets on the platform if you want to get your hands dirty if that is interesting to you go on check the test net place a bet try it out so where are we trying to get with this what is like the end state what is the end goal creating a new experience for bettors and for players in the world is a big thing but what is even bigger is what this can do to the betting industry as a whole so let's have a look at like just like touching the surface of uh you know the architecture of our of our solution first liquidity provision uh that of course is very important as we said when we were looking at prediction markets liquidity provided on azure protocol goes into one big pool and here we are saying multiple pools but the idea here is like maybe you have a pool for football you have a pool for tennis or you have a pool for a particular league but it is liquidity is provided to one pool okay from where it is appropriated all the markets all the bets all the events that happen on the protocol so liquidity providers are not exposed to any particular events betting risk which is extremely important to have consistency in the api provided for liquidity providers so that we can have a lot of money deposited for liquidity on the protocol that's first second the events are not created by people nobody has to actually come in and create a market for a particular game these are important real world data is imported via uh oracles from the well from the real world and uh and the events are created then of course they become markets and people start betting on them but settlement and the creation of events is done via oracle so that's that means that we can have many many many markets to bet on and much with the liquidity now we have a lot of liquidity that can be appropriated to many markets okay so we are getting very close to the expectation of betters right i can bet on many things and i actually can't do it right because there is something to back my bets next betters in the future of decentralized betting do not interact with azuro the protocol directly this happens via front-ends front-ends are built on top of the protocol and they essentially tap into what currently a traditional bookmaker does there is money for betting so there is liquidity already the events are being created the odds are being uh set and the events are being set up and the money is being moved all of this happens here the front end operators they only do user acquisition which changes the game massively for what like currently a bookmaker is and what a bookmaker can be in the future imagine today these are well just bookmakers but in the future anybody can can come and do this virtually so this could be a football club that wants to you know like front run the bookmakers and and you know i go to their fans and say look we have our own solution you don't need to go to this book or the other book and they're our sponsors we can do it ourselves right so support the club open up a front end football leagues influencers sports celebrities a navi a compound anybody who has user base and wants to give a wider breadth of services to that user base can actually come and run a front end and of course take parts of the earnings of the protocol and then of course in the end it is a dial so key decisions are being made by the by the token holders so when you look at this together this is what a bookmaker currently is it is a bookmaker-centric industry but this industry can become more democratized and sharing way more value with much more participants in terms of liquidity provision data and feed providers oracles front-end operators and of course governance so i care about this but most people in crypto to be honest they don't care about sports and when i started following crypto i actually started caring less about sports myself but why why should why should we care about this this is a massive massive industry estimated in the hundreds of billions by by by any you know like serious research company out there and also more than half of adult population has placed bets billions of people are placing bets this is the reality today they suffer from untransparent and very often unfair betting but betting can be trustless betting can be transparent betting can be more fair betting can be more fun and it can share much more value with many more participants onozuro thank you