In most sports bets, the middleman decides the odds on behalf of the participants. While the bettors claim the risk, a third party decides the rate of their risk/reward. Since sports bets have become a massive market, a middleman deciding odds makes it easier for the market to scale. However, such a system doesn’t allow the market to decide the risk/reward of a bet.

Scalability and authentic valuation are at an odds in the current state of the sports betting market. If sports betting were to be modelled after the trade of assets, then both scalability can be achieved without sacrificing authentic valuation.

An Orderbook for Bets

Blockchain technology has already delivered trustless peer-to-peer betting. Dozens of applications on several blockchains have used smart contracts as an escrow for the staked funds in a bet; decentralized sources of winning numbers ensure that no single entity can control the outcome of a bet. However, existing applications have primarily focused on delivering traditional casino games.

The benefits blockchain can deliver in the betting market hasn’t properly been leveraged in the booming sports betting industry.

A new blockchain startup, MeVu, has launched the first-ever orderbook for sports bets. The application functions like a decentralized exchange as smart contracts hold users funds, bettors can make stakes in cryptocurrency, and autonomous oracles provide the data used by the smart contracts to choose a winner.

By turning the sports betting market into a decentralized exchange, the market is able to make bets in a true peer-to-peer manner where each bettor can decide the odds he or she is willing to take.

An Orderbook

For both traditional and digital assets, orderbooks have provided an opportunity for the market to rapidly value any asset.

A bet, in one perspective, is an asset since it’s an agreement with a future cashflow. Thus, MeVu is able to turn bets into an orderbook where bettors are able to decide how much they seek to win for their risked assets. While some bettors make their limit orders on their preferred game, other bettors can use MeVu’s application to make market orders by accepting the proposed risk/reward odds that match their preference.

In a traditional asset’s orderbook, limit ask orders that demand a higher price for the asset are placed higher in the book. Similarly, on MeVu, limit ask orders that demand a higher reward for risked amount of funds are placed higher. Thus, as a bettor who is willing to take a lower reward for risked assets will have his/her order filled before the bettors who seek a higher reward for their agreed amount of risk.

With such an application, bettors can eventually agree on an equilibrium rate themselves.

This will be decided by the primary amount of settled bets at a risk/reward ratio the greater portion of the participants are willing to take. Through MeVu, bettors no longer need to accept the unnegotiable reward values that are set by centralized bookies. Instead, the people who are taking the risk—the bettors—are the ones deciding the reward values of their bets by only accepting bet orders that meet their desired risk/reward ratio.

Lower Fees & Greater Access

MeVu opens the sports betting market to bettors who seek to make trustless peer-to-peer bets in cryptocurrency. The platform currently aims to target a vast number of sports as-well-as eSports. This ensures that the benefits MeVu delivers are accessible to incredibly large audience. By enabling the market to make bets in cryptocurrencies, anyone anywhere can be a part of the ecosystem. This removes the need for payment processors like PayPal.

Additionally, with the aid of smart contracts, no central entity even controls funds or decides on the outcome of a bet. Thus, bettors exchange funds and make agreements directly within themselves; the MeVu application simply becomes a platform that enables the interactions. Since the technology merely enables the orderbook, the operating costs are far lower than an enterprise bookie. This allows MeVu to charge fees that are only a fraction of the traditional commissions charged in the sports betting market.

Two kinds of applications are successful in the current state of the cryptocurrency space: casinos and exchanges.

MeVu takes the two and delivers a novel solution to the sports betting market by taking advantage of blockchain technology’s most organic utilities like trustless escrow, transparency, and peer-to-peer engagement. Through these benefits, MeVu could pave the way for a new form of sports betting where there is no need for a middleman, and the risk/reward ratios are decided by the market, similar to the equilibrium pricing of traditional assets.

Initial Exchange Offering

MeVu's amazing testnet is already live: https://dapp.mevu.bet.

To carry the project forward, MeVu's team has partnered with ProBit Cryptocurrency Exchange to launch an initial exchange offering (IEO) from June 10 - June 21.