Many would argue that participation in the cryptocurrency industry is a gamble. Who can really know for sure if the price of a token will rise or fall? As for lending and borrowing, all that glitters isn’t gold: even attractive liquidity pools can leave participants burned due to smart contract exploits, impermanent loss, rug-pulls and all the rest.

Whatever your views on this topic, gambling – real gambling – is belatedly making its way to the web3 world courtesy of The Bet, an on-chain sports betting platform built on Arbitrum, arguably the most popular L2 network that is launching an airdrop for early users this week. As a decentralized application (dApp), The Bet has a simple premise at its heart: eliminate the gambling middlemen and compete not against the house, but your fellow players. Game on.

From DeFi to GambleFi

Every gambler wants to “beat the bookie.” It’s a philosophy as entrenched in the betting culture as “sticking it to the man” is in, well, anarchist circles. Pitting your wits against a bookmaker and emerging with a fat bankroll and bragging rights is irresistible, which is why gambling is rather addictive. It’s not just the prospect of victory; it’s the idea of defying the natural order of things.

The bookie has historically been an essential cog in the machine. Once a shrewd man who saw the angles, then a wily team of them, now essentially represented by a suite of automated programs generating odds from different data inputs, the bookie ultimately wants to make money for himself. That’s his métier.

But The Bet upends this long-established system by leveraging the blockchain to remove bookies from the equation. In his place, there are liquidity pools with users of the platform responsible for creating their own odds around each and every event. For example, users can stake their wager within one of three liquidity pools (Team A, Team B, Draw), whereafter pools lock and the final payout ratios are displayed according to the LP contributions. Once the event is complete, the victors claim the spoils.

In this new system, there are no opaque inputs as all information is made available on the blockchain and players go head-to-head. The Bet, meanwhile, supplies hash numbers and verification via its dApp, API (the same one used by numerous top sports gambling sites), and on-chain sources to ensure every wager is above-board. With the odds continually changing, bettors can view a Calculator on the match-betting dashboard after placing their wager.

Supporting an array of sports, from American football and soccer to basketball, baseball, combat and eSports, The Bet is the brainchild of a team of passionate gamblers and web3 developers that see blockchain as the perfect rails for modern sports betting. This commitment to transparency is also reinforced by the publication of the algorithm that determines the odds for various events, and the platform’s smart contracts have been audited by SolidProof.

Being that it’s a web3 project, The Bet is powered by a native token ($BET), of which there is a maximum supply of 10 million. The token incentivizes participation in The Bet ecosystem, such as through staking: players who stake $BET in the dApp earn 50% of platform fees. Needless to say, that’s precisely 50% more than your regular sportsbook will give you.

A Growing Global Market

The sports betting market was valued at $83.65 billion last year, and is expected to exceed $182bn by the end of the decade. The Bet aims to capitalize on this soaring consumer interest, but in a way that returns power to the players and introduces a PvP dynamic that previously didn’t exist.

The same model is behind the success of competitive sports apps like Fantasy Premier League, which has over 9 million players. Last year, more than 62 million people played fantasy sports throughout the US and Canada.

Of course, many fantasy sports games are free – sports betting is a different proposition entirely. Still, with both activities in the ascendancy, it’s easy to imagine players foregoing their need to “beat the bookie” or out-predict their pals and give The Bet a whirl instead. Particularly with Arbitrum having established itself as one of the most attractive Ethereum layer-2 solutions since debuting in 2021.

Although sports wagering is The Bet’s bread and butter, there are plans to eventually expand to support other on-chain PvP wager games including coin flips, roulette, raffles and so on. Providing it maintains its staunch commitment to fairness, transparency and revenue-sharing, it could help establish GambleFi as the next big thing in web3.