Sports betting is a sector that gets little love from blockchain enthusiasts. Surprisingly, if you think about it, because many of the problems blockchain technology promises to solve have plagued the sports betting industry for years:
- Predatory bookmakers that are happy to let losers lose but restrict winners.
- A reliance on arbitrary rule-making that bookies can change as they please.
- A heavily permissioned and gated market that offers players only a Hobson’s choice.
Apex146 may be one platform that is out to change that.
Founded by Scott Robinson, a former McKinsey and Oliver Wyman employee, Apex146 is the first sports analytics platform incorporating blockchain tech. What started as a passion project during a University of California Santa Barbara internship may be the beginning of a revolution in the sports betting industry.
Robinson, who is familiar with the Moneyball story of statistical methods revolutionising baseball, already had a strong analytical background from working in capital markets and commodity trading. Data science, tech, and trading knowledge can easily be transferred from capital markets to sports trading, and that is how Robinson came up with his data-based approach to motor racing. His company analyses relevant data from races to create a model that predicts the outcome of future races based on the statistics it gets fed with.
Robinson expects blockchain and sports betting to become much closer intertwined in the future:
“There were two blockchain-based sports betting platforms that we thought had a real chance of penetrating the market and more would follow over the next several years.”
His team launched an oracle through Chainlink, the biggest “connector” of the blockchain world and the real world, allowing decentralised applications to access sports analytics data from Apex146. This links sports prediction markets on-chain and analytics data off-chain and creates an on-chain dynamic not possible without the oracle integration.
Blockchain-based betting is here to stay
Apex146 is only one of many examples of how blockchain can amplify and improve systems that currently work with a server-database structure. But it is far from the only betting-focused platform trying to make strides in the blockchain industry and push back against the dominance of traditional bookmakers.
Thus far, prediction markets rather than sports-oriented trading markets have seen the most success on the blockchain. Polymarket may be the most popular among them, a prediction market built on the Polygon chain that offers markets around politics, economics, crypto, and current affairs. Augur is another well-known one, even though it has been struggling with providing the liquidity needed to attract bigger traders. And then there is a whole host of smaller upstarts like Polkamarkets that are diligently building their product on layer-two chains.
Sports betting is close to financial markets, and financial products have seen the most success on blockchain technology thus far. Although sports markets do face additional conundrums like relying on oracle-based data to enable trading the underlying events – a similar problem that traditional, non-crypto capital markets face when going on-chain – over time, these should be solvable. Maybe we don’t need to go as far as supply chains for the next sector disrupted by blockchains. The answer may be staring us right in the face.
