Name of Project/DAO/Company
Blockchain Basketball Betting (BBB)
Application Type
Product Launch
Proposal Overview
BBB is the first dedicated decentralized sports betting platform that allows users to bet on sports games without interference from a third party sportsbook. Since the inception of sports betting, the house has always won: in exchange for providing their services, centralized sportsbooks set lines for bets such that their expected earnings are positive, and users’ are negative. Sportsbooks also control payouts and charge heavy fees, creating a predatory gambling environment monopolized by a few casinos in Vegas. By deploying audited smart contracts to handle sports betting and taking the sportsbook out of the equation, we let users and the market set the lines and give bettors full control over their decision making and earnings.
For grant priority purposes, please note that this project was developed for Harmony’s University Hackathon over Dec. 2021-January 2022 and finished second place overall. Our github with code, link to web app, and Youtube demo are all linked at the end of the proposal. Our project name is also temporary, we’re in the process of ideating something more fitting than our hackathon project name.
Technical Breakdown
Our dapp works as such: our smart contract indexes NBA games and holds funds bet on the home team or the away team in the contract. Upon the completion of the game, the result is sent to the contract and the contract releases all funds bet on that game to people who bet on the winning team. Each winner earns a prorated sum depending on how much they originally bet (e.g. if you bet 100 ONE on the home team and there was a total of 1000 ONE bet on the home team, if the home team wins, you would earn 10% of the away team’s pool as your reward, along with your initial bet back). This model of betting allows the market of bettors to set lines: the Pistons have a much worse record than the Suns, who are much more favored to win if the teams play; hence more people would bet on the Suns and people who bet on the Pistons would have a larger potential pool of rewards than the pool they bet. It is zero-sum, no central party is taking a cut, and betting lines aren’t set in a way such that not all money is returned to the betters.
Where we’re at
We have deployed smart contracts and a React based web interface that connects to MetaMask and lets users bet real testnet tokens on Harmony’s testnet. The interface is functional but not fully audited; we built the project under time pressure for the Harmony University Hackathon so some bugs and lack of features like some old games accidentally showing up on the main page, smart contract having to be prompted by a daily cron job to release tokens instead of doing it automatically, and not showing bet amounts for each team on the web interface so each user has full information (code for this is written but not yet fully reviewed and deployed) still exist.
The core of the product is working correctly though: upon the completion of a game, the result is sent to the contract and correctly disperses the fund prorated to the people betting on the winning team.
Where we’re going
The ultimate vision of our product is to become the go to sports betting platform on Harmony. We support NBA games right now because that was the best sport to integrate within the timeframe of the hackathon (NBA was deep in season), but we will look to support more sports. We also need to better define our betting mechanism: we hope to flesh out a better algorithm that more fairly rewards earlier (and thus more uncertain) bettors, or to institute spot betting, where people’s betting “line” is the proportion of bets at the time in which they place their bet (as such to create the ultimate fair and free betting market).
Why you should care
More and more people around the world are buying into sports betting, and along with that, more and more people are getting sick of Vegas stealing their money and the lack of trustworthy, truly fair platforms. Demand for the idea behind our platform is high, and as such the success of our platform would give millions of already crypto curious people the reason they need to dive into Harmony and the decentralized world. Someone has to build a decentralized sports betting platform eventually (existing projects like Augur don’t cover sports betting well or have incredibly small volume); we already have a working proof of concept and want to see what we can do from here.
Team
Our core team is a group of four Harvard CS students with strong backgrounds in both software/dapp/smart contract development, product management, venture capital/investing, and business strategy/consulting.
Grant Purpose
We are looking for Harmony’s support and funding to help us build, market, and scale our dapp. In particular, we would like funding to hire a graphic designer or outsource graphic design work and a lawyer to assist us in navigating the challenging regulatory landscape of online gambling with cryptocurrencies. These are potentially large costs that must be covered for a sports betting dapp to scale.
Additionally, we need to cover operating expenses, such as getting game data from oracles, Chainlink jobs, purchasing a domain name, web hosting, and more.
Proposal Ask
$50K contingent upon below metrics for success.
Metrics for Success
- $10K after launching a feature-complete product on Harmony testnet
- $10K after forming a DAO with 5-out-of-9 multisig with Harmony DAOs
- $10K after launching on Harmony mainnet with audit
- $10K after 1K daily active users (with launch video, full PR promotion)
- $10K after 10k daily active users (with a detailed roadmap, governance process)
Progress on our Metrics
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Already Accomplished: Feature complete application that’s deployed onto testnet. Won 2nd place in Harmony’s University Hackathon.
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Weeks 1-3: Build out user functionality and bug test web and smart contract interface. Start conducting beta testing on “base” version of the app.
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Weeks: 4-8: Integrate and test new features (complex bets, rewarding users who get in early, exhaustive edge case testing). Extensive oracle integration is completed here, as well as iterating product off of users’ feedback (choosing more sports to integrate etc.)
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Weeks 8-9: Launch on the mainnet.
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Following months: Acquire 10k new users
WAGMI!
to see weekly updates on this thread here, to keep the community posted on this proposal’s progress!