How Does Blockchain Improve Sports Betting?

Analysts at Grand View Research estimated the sports betting market to be worth $83.65 billion in 2022, with a potential compound annual growth rate of 10.3% through 2030. The development of the online betting sector and, in particular, the intensive adoption of innovative blockchain technologies in traditional sports betting systems is one of the main growth drivers. 

Blockchain adoption is also facilitated by the high level of competition in the industry, which forces companies to evolve constantly, offering new opportunities for users. Therefore, one of the most basic requests of sports betting fans is the fairness and transparency of online bookmakers. That’s why platforms that introduce blockchain technologies win in the competitive struggle, earning the community’s loyalty. 

How Exactly Does Blockchain Improve Sports Betting?

Fairness issues remain major concerns in the betting industry and gambling in general. They affect crucial, from a user’s perspective, business processes in betting, which are: 

• betting processing; 
• the display of results; 
• payments to clients. 

In traditional online betting services, each stage is likely to be subject to human factors and third-party influence. However, the introduction of blockchain largely automates these processes, making them as transparent as possible and creating new opportunities for players. 

Transparency

One of the key features of blockchain technology is immutability. Any data added to the blockchain network can’t be changed retroactively or deleted. Programmability is another important quality of blockchain. Betting platforms that integrate blockchain fully, not just at the level of marketing promises, create smart contracts to automate all processes. This eliminates the possibility of fraudulent manipulation of payouts, betting odds, and game results. 

The third essential feature of blockchain is transparency. Due to this, using public blockchain networks makes it possible to thoroughly study the entire history of transactions and operation mechanisms of smart contracts. On the one hand, this poses additional cybersecurity risks, so large blockchain projects always conduct detailed technical security audits, including those involving users. But what’s more, such openness guarantees maximum transparency and completely eliminates the potential influence of the human factor on the bookmaker’s side.

Provable Fairness 

The concept of proof of liabilities is one of the features of betting platforms based on blockchain. It’s an algorithm that automatically verifies betting results using cryptographic hash functions such as SHA256 or SHA3. The ability to calculate hash values based on any number of inputs and the openness of data in the blockchain network eliminates the possibility of manipulating the results calculation process. 

Thus, any player can check the algorithms of a sports betting service that uses such a system. Besides, the betting service provider often makes the output data available through open APIs and publishes it publicly. This is one of the competitive advantages of blockchain betting over traditional services. Therefore, administrators of such platforms actively use it in their communications to emphasize transparency and openness. 

Tokenization

Tokenizing sports betting is one of the additional benefits of blockchain betting platforms. In essence, each bet is a token that guarantees its owner the fulfillment of the bet’s terms. 

Tokenized bets are digital assets. They can be exchanged and even traded. In the future, this will lead to the emergence of decentralized sports betting markets. For example, a bet placed ten minutes before the end of a match could be sold to another player before it started. This will help develop an additional ecosystem around betting platforms, expanding profit opportunities for players.

Prospects for Blockchain Betting 

Decentralized markets for tokenized betting trading are just one option for the further development of blockchain betting. Among the most likely and promising directions of betting’s “evolution” are integration with Metaverse technologies, various forms of virtual (VR) and augmented reality (AR), the P2E projects sector, and decentralized prediction protocols based on artificial intelligence (AI). 

Blockchain technology enables sports betting fans to access more opportunities nowadays. Dexsport, a decentralized betting protocol, is a case in point. The project has its own native token DESU, which allows community members to send funds to liquidity pools, receiving a percentage of deposits and various preferences for this.

In this way, blockchain improves the sports betting industry today, making it more transparent and honest. It opens new opportunities for sports betting enthusiasts by introducing them to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.