I bet you win: online gaming and sports betting have all the chances to become the biggest use case for smart-contracts

Stop talking, give us real use cases

In just a few years, the crypto industry has made its way from a gray, unclear and almost unknown space to a trendy, hi-tech subject. Crypto has become a buzzword — and the talk about what ‘is going to happen’ is relentless. But where are the real world use-cases of people actually using crypto today? Despite all the buzz, we have so far failed to find real-world adoption at any kind of scale.

Crypto is just too cryptic for the masses and it lacks real use cases. “How can I use it in my daily life?” would be a reasonable question of a typical non-geek person. But to gain mass adoption cutting-edge technology should be designed around real-world use cases.

Due to the recent legislation changes in the U.S., we’ve now got the chance to improve the situation and to get gamers and sports fans ‘on board’.

New horizons

Until now, gambling on online gaming and sports betting has been largely prohibited in the U.S. — sports betting has been banned in the US with the exception of one state for the last 25 years. But in May 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court gave the green light for sports betting to become legal, or at least to let the legality be decided by individual states rather than at federal government level.

The great news is that the free market has listened and the reaction has been positive! Over 20 states have already considered or are currently considering taking advantage of their new powers. Experts expect this number to increase considerably. That is also an opportunity for Byteball, a DAG-based cryptocurrency platform, one of the key differentiators of which are the easy to read (and write) smart contracts.

Peer-to-peer makes betting easy and safe

Peer-to-peer smart payments could bring sports betting to a whole new level. In general, crypto technology promises better transparency, accountability and ease of payments. One of the great features of Byteball P2P contracts is that they can be created between two equal peers without using any centralized intermediaries, without using complex broker-smart-contracts (which are common on Ethereum), and with complete clarity for both parties on what exactly they are agreeing to. It’s like betting with friends you trust using cash, except here there’s no need to have either friends or cash. You can bet with anybody, and you don’t have to trust them to follow through on the bet because the funds are locked in a human-readable Byteball smart contract.

You bet, who wins?

Byteball had already been involved in P2P gambling using smart contracts since September 2017, when its Betting Bot was launched. Now they are taking another step forward. Byteball signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ProGame Sports, an online gaming company that is building a P2P betting marketplace called Mountaineer.

The Mountaineer platform is built from the ground up with Byteball technology and is focused on facilitating P2P betting — there will be no sportsbook, complicated odds, or DFS rosters. The betting is very straightforward because the proposition bets are easy to understand.

David Ealy, Co-Founder of ProGame, stated:

“This opens up a largely untapped target audience in the US. Studies of the target audience were generally focused on the DFS market and/or very early adopters, primarily because gambling had previously been illegal. The plan is to provide, exciting new gambling experiences (e.g., in the area of eSports where previously it had been very difficult to legally make bets), and also to the current casual gamer.”

Steve Safronov of Byteball who helped finalize the deal with ProGame added:

“We have built a platform that opens near endless possibilities in the peer-to-peer market. We are now seeking to create more use cases and illustrate how secure and easy-to-build smart contracts can be applied to the real world. We see the online gaming industry as an entry point to introduce cutting-edge Byteball technology to the general public. ProGame Sports has all that it takes to put it to work in the fast growing US market.”