The problem Bookies Labs solves

Sportsbooks charge high fees and ban/limit profitable bettors due to the risk they take as a counterparty to all bets on their platform. Centralized sports betting exchanges solve this issue by creating a peer-to-peer betting platform, but are still fundamentally extractive and struggle with liquidity across many events and have a complicated UX. Furthermore, online sports betting lacks important social elements (i.e. trash talking opponents, copy trade, and discuss results with their friends).

From first principles, blockchains remove intermediaries and allow for trustless settlement of transactions. While we think the knee jerk reaction to this realization was to create DeFi (disintermediate banking), we believe a less obvious application is the disintermediation of the sportsbook, who charge high fees and ban profitable bettors at their discretion.

Bookies facilitates a new sports betting experience, leveraging trustless settlement, integrating into a social feed, and utilizing advanced cross-matching algorithms to create a novel peer-to-peer sports betting exchange. Using an exchange model and a structure of decentralized platform ownership, we can effectively align the user’s goals with the platform’s goals. Users will be rewarded with ownership stake based on their contribution, a mechanism only possible using blockchain technology.

What further sets us apart from existing betting exchanges is our decision to integrate into a social feed. Sports betting is inherently a social phenomenon and interacting with other bettors, trash talking opponents, and placing bets should all exist in the same place. Because of this insight, we decided to launch our MVP on Warpcast, a decentralized social network built on Ethereum. Sports betting on a social feed is a brand new experience for bettors around the world and is drastically simpler in terms of UX compared to alternatives.

Challenges we ran into

One hurdle we ran into was pivoting from an “app profile” on Warpcast to a more social and community-faced profile when we launched our MVP on the platform. Our initial vision for @Bookies was to use the profile as a way to post events via Frames and keep the feed simple. We quickly realized that this approach would not be viable, as community-engagement via things like memes and discussion of current events was a far more effective way to attract new users to our platform. Warpcast-native projects like $DEGEN were also things that we retroactively decided to integrate as a way to engage with the community and build rapport amongst developers in that ecosystem. We leaned into this culture by integrating unique features like betting with your $DEGEN tip allowance and “rains” into the betting experience.

On the technical side, there were a lot of technical issues with developing the smart contracts as well as the frames. In terms of the smart contract, we ran into trouble integrating UMA’s Optimistic Oracle. The key issue we faced was that there was no clear format for submitting requests for event data. We worked with UMA’s team to reformat their ancillary data parser to enable a list of choices for the outcome of the event, simplifying the process for proposers. In terms of frame development, we had initially created a system where bettors would have to claim their winnings after the event ended. We realized that this process added friction to the betting experience and decided that the claim process needed to be automated given the nature of building an application on top of a social feed. With this in mind, we developed a bot that notified users on an event’s settlement and provided them with a Basescan link attached to their payout. In addition, there were a lot of challenges building our frontend, specifically converting our Figma design into tailwind CSS for styling components. We eventually used an AI tool to help convert our Figma design.