Phase 1 is Complete

Purebet
8 min readApr 7, 2023

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Look at all the shiny new things we added: Azuro, Aver, cricket, UFC, baseball, new handicap markets, fixed soccer totals. Amazing!

We have been quiet for the past few weeks as we have worked on major upgrades to the platform. Each change is incremental on its own but combines to make an important step forward for Purebet. We have reached a stage in development where we offer all key markets for all key sports and have a wide selection of venues to pull liquidity from.

The summary:

  • We have rewritten most of the Purebet code at this point to be more flexible and adjustable to the market’s needs.
  • We have added new handicap markets for all American sports and soccer.
  • We have adjusted the soccer over/under markets to make sure we are showing appropriate lines all the time now.
  • We have added Aver Exchange liquidity to our books. (Delayed while Aver fix an issue on their side but ready to go as soon as they do.)
  • We have added Azuro’s AMM curve liquidity to our books.
  • We have added MLB baseball, UFC, and IPL cricket to our list of leagues.
  • We have a new risk free bet promotion for new users.
  • We are looking to expand the team and raise funds.

New additions

We have adjusted the code for which totals markets are shown on the website. We will monitor the effects of this and listen to community feedback on their preferences for other changes we can make to improve the user experience.

We have added handicap markets to NBA, NHL, MLB, and added 2 markets per soccer game. This gives the option to take a safer line on your pick, or go for glory with big odds if your team wins big. Again, we will monitor feedback on how users feel about this.

It is America’s summer pastime and it is new on Purebet — get the best odds on every MLB moneyline, total, and handicap bet you place on-chain.

The Indian Premier League of cricket is taking the on-chain betting world by storm thanks to BetDEX’s tight odds and thick liquidity. And it just got even tighter and thicker as we pull odds from BetDEX, Overtime, and Aver. There is no better place to bet on the IPL.

You asked for UFC and you got UFC. Every fight, big and small is now on Purebet, with liquidity pulled from both Overtime and Azuro (and maybe Aver for the fights they have) so you get the best odds without searching around.

And don’t forget the NBA playoffs. EVERY venue we have added has NBA games so I expect to see a few arbitrage opportunities and insanely tight and thick books.

New promotion

To celebrate the completion of Phase 1, we are launching a free bet offer. This offer is open to anyone who has used any integrated protocol before the start of this campaign. Your first bet at Purebet is risk free, up to $10. If your bet loses, we will refund your stake, up to $10. So whether you want to have your first ever cricket bet without a sweat or take a punt on a big odds soccer handicap, now is your chance.

We know it isn’t a massive amount but we have limited funds and want to allow as many people as possible to participate. Check out our docs for the full terms and keep an eye on our socials for any further announcements regarding the promotion.

The future

First of all, the product. We will continue to add sports, leagues, and markets as the on-chain industry expands and there are venues we can pull from. The next step will likely be more soccer leagues, especially as the main European leagues end and we move into Nordic, and some Asian and South American seasons beginning. We will be looking to add esports in the near future as we add more protocols which offer esports betting.

On major events that more integrated venues have, we are already showing better odds than Pinnacle for smaller bets. As we add more venues, this will get even better for smaller bets and be better than Pinnacle for larger bets too. This is because we split large bets over many protocols to reduce the slippage.

In older articles, the list of venues mentioned were Overtime, BetDEX, Aver, Azuro, Pool Props, SX Bet, and Divvy. We have now integrated most of these (Pool Props yet to relaunch, Divvy just went on mainnet recently, and we had to skip over SX because their fees made their odds uncompetitive but they are halving fees and it is now likely worthwhile to add them). The next batch of venues will include SX Bet, Divvy, Pool Props (once it is live) and newer protocols like Colosseum, Sided/Goal3, FAVE BET, WINR, DecentraBet, and BetSwap v2 as they go live and produce developer documentation or lend us a hand. If you are a betting protocol not on this list, or are thinking about building something fresh and novel in design, get in touch and we can advise on the simple tools we need from you.

In order to make growth happen, we are looking to expand the team. We are looking for backend devs, blockchain devs, UI designers (I designed the UI in one night — it is awful) and frontend devs. In order to grow the team and the product, we are also looking for all things biz dev to be covered: from marketing and user acquisition, to running partnerships, and (most importantly) raising funds. The entire project has been built with lots of free time and $2000 from a hackathon prize. (Please do not join the Discord and ask to be a mod, we haven’t raised the funds to pay you $60k a year to be in our server…yet.)

We are keen to talk to anyone who wants to basically head up the whole prediction markets and/or binary options side. If you are keen to work on promoting these markets, market making prediction markets, or trading binary options markets, get in touch. This section could be spun out into a completely different UI style, more suited to the markets in question.

As more new protocols come online and get integrated into Purebet, it is inevitable that they launch tokens to incentivise users. This is already the case with Overtime and THALES rewards, and SX Bet with their SX token bet mining scheme. Since our wallets are used to place the bets, it accrues the rewards. We aim to build up our holdings of protocol tokens so we can align ourselves with our partners and contribute to the governance of the whole sector. To emphasise this, we would be interested in a small team joining us to build up a sub-protocol which allows users to deposit betting protocol tokens which we would stake/lock/hold to accrue rewards and send the rewards back to depositors (as Plutus is to Arbitrum-based protocol governance, we would be to betting protocol governance).

Purebet does not yet have a token and no token is in the works. However, since we understand the importance of decentralisation and we have #RealYield proportional to our user volume, we believe we can create a flywheel effect by incentivising users of Purebet. A token will not be launched until we have increased our volume and user numbers by many orders of magnitude and expanded the team.

Phase 1 of building is coming to an end, but we are only just beginning. The on-chain betting space is moving FAST. Join us as a user and supporter, or a team member, as we improve on-chain sports betting in an unimaginable way.

Join our Discord: https://discord.com/invite/22tr2FYAh9

Follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Purebet_io

Our website: https://www.purebet.io

BONUS SECTION

As we add Azuro and reach the end of Phase 1, I just want to add a paragraph to mention the inspiration and origins of Purebet.

I was first inspired to begin work on an on-chain sports betting protocol long before anyone of this new generation was publicly announced. The inspiration initially came from Sam Trabucco (fuck you) on an episode of Up Only, when he gave his final piece of alpha. He said, “Everyone has some things they’re good at and things they aren’t good at. Find things you are good at and absolutely go nuts at them.” (https://twitter.com/cmsintern/status/1431016303159095301/photo/4 thank you CMS Intern for documenting it. Have a laugh at other stuff he said at the time, hilarious).

I was good at sports betting, had a good knowledge of the market and industry, had a good understanding of crypto, and was terrible at trading. Instead of trying to make it on 100x leverage, I decided I was going to contribute to the space. I had no idea how to build on Solana but knew it was the only option since paying $80 in gas to bet $10 was simply not possible. Eventually, after many failed partnerships with potential developers, I found the Purebet co-founder in a betting protocol’s discord server who said he had built an on-chain sports betting exchange but had no idea about sports betting to turn it into a protocol.

We built around my original idea of an on-chain exchange purely for p2p and market maker-to-user betting. However, I was acutely aware of issues around seeding liquidity. We would either need to secure the efforts of a traditional sports market maker or be left with nothing for users to bet against. We had discussed the idea of using the odds from traditional bookmakers to run our own market maker bot but that would be a lot of work to design and code in itself and we could get a few bad positions and lose all our money.

At this time BetDEX announced their massive $21 million raise, Aver had won a prize in the Solana hackathon, and Azuro had appeared into the world. I tuned into an Azuro community call because I was keen to hear more about how Azuro’s AMM worked to try to exploit it as a punter (I am up a good bit betting with them and was number 2 in profit on their Dune dashboard at one point). I mentioned I was also trying to build an on-chain sports betting protocol in the chat and Rossen (Azuro co-founder) invited me to discuss more over Telegram. He said, “In the niche of exchanges you have projects with a ton of money (case in point BetDEX) so they will outspend you easily.”

I took this onboard: the idea had been great at the start, but the market moved fast and we would become dust if we tried to beat the bigger teams. I was on holiday, sitting on a train blasting through the German countryside when I realised what was missing in the new market: an aggregator. There are DEX and NFT aggregators to get you the best price on your buys and sells. There are sports betting aggregators to tell you where to go to get the best odds on your bet; and sports betting platforms which take all the Asian bookies and show them in one place and automatically execute your order at the best venue for your bet. As the on-chain betting space grows, the best odds and deepest liquidity will get more and more fragmented across chains and between protocols. Since we began work on the new vision of Purebet, this prediction has become very true and it is only accelerating as new and novel designs and protocols are appearing every other week.

So thank you Rossen for pushing us to do better and build a much better product in the end and being one of our earliest supporters.

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Purebet

A decentralised sports betting exchange, liquidity aggregator, and degam ecosystem.