Blockchain-based betting platform completes $3.5 million funding round led by Gnosis

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Blockchain-based betting DAO (decentralized autonomous organization), Azuro announced a successful $3.5 million seed round funding led by Gnosis, Flow Ventures, Polymorphic Capital. Other venture capital firms in the round included Ethereal Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital, AllianceDAO (a.k.a. DeFi Alliance), Delphi Digital, Meta Cartel Ventures, Merit Circle, and Clever Advertising, one of the largest global sports media. The latest funding round will be used in the development of the platform with an aim to disrupt the traditional betting market. The funding will be used to build a trustless, permissionless proposition, and to create the new betting layer on top of web3 with totally novel use-cases and functionality, a statement from the team reads. 

Other VCs and Angels who have joined are SevenX, OP Crypto (lead by ex-Huobi David Gan), CitizenX, BR Capital, David Post (Chainlink), Alex Wearn (IDEX founder), Sergei Chan. With the partners ranging from blockchain gaming, DeFi, Web3, and the traditional betting space, the Azuro team believes the investors will further their efforts in the Web3 betting market, leveraging their expertise and capital to expand the project both “sector-wise and geographically”. 

The betting and prediction market on blockchains has failed to take off in the past due to the high barriers of entry associated with the capital and expertise-intensive industry. Additionally, the lack of clear regulation and geographical constraints has stagnated the growth of blockchain-based betting firms across the globe. Finally, the longevity of prediction markets without active solutions (re: Gnosis, now a partner at Azuro) has killed the spirit of development in the field despite having incredible minds and capable teams to see the market take off. 

“The repeated failure of peer-to-peer iterations of prediction markets has led to complete skepticism of decentralized betting,” Ninor Mansor of Arrington XRP Capital said. “Azuro’s peer-to-pool approach represents a true turning point, building off the learnings of DeFi to build a system that challenges the consensus view”

Despite many projects, such as Augur, brazing and surviving in the current market conditions, there are still big issues facing the industry, top of them – liquidity, product depth, and user experience.  As it has been, prediction and betting markets’ peer-to-peer model inhibits efficient liquidity allocation. For instance, liquidity providers (LPs) on prediction markets have to set the odds manually, provide liquidity, and start markets that they create. Given that liquidity is provided for each market, the LP faces the betting risk to lose their money. This means there are very few liquidity providers and in turn betting becomes impossible. 

With the new funding, Azuro plans to build efficient liquidity provision pools, live betting odds from external parties, a superior UX, and a neutral betting DAO. The platform utilizes smart contract technology to build a totally decentralized and trustless betting protocol to deal with liquidity provision and allocation. Unlike the current decentralized betting solutions, Azuro introduces pooled liquidity (similar to lending protocols or DEXs) to scale prediction markets. This makes the platform more transparent and trustless while maintaining the liquidity depth of the markets and providing an easy-to-navigate front end. 

Lastly, Azuro plans to launch decentralized governance on the betting platform via their DAO platform. As a project with no equity and immune to regulation or legal issues, players retain control over the platform. The launch of the DAO will enable everyone with an Azuro token to enjoy the advantages of the decentralized betting infrastructure of the future while controlling governance on the platform.  

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