What are the main value propositions of steemsports.com and how is it different to sports betting?
Sports betting is a 3 Trillion dollar industry, with vast global communities and sub-communities where sports enthusiasts love to support and wager on their favourite teams. Unfortunately there are certain barriers and challenges in the sports betting industry, namely country specific restrictions and regulations, delayed withdrawls, unfair and non-transparent bookmaking practices, high transaction fees and games with a bias towards the bookmaker with constantly moving betting lines, banning of “sharp” players, among other things.
Steemsports aims to win over the sports betting market to its alternate less regulated, Prediction Games method of playing with a potentially greater appeal. The proposed Prediction Games concept relies on Digital Tokens to play, which are largely unregulated and not under the jurisdiction of many gambling laws.
There are no AML or KYC requirements at this stage, only a non-descript Steem profile account is required, which can be created on the steemit.com social site and later on steemsports.com when we develop the account creation functionality.
Possibly the biggest draw card is that SteemSports is a “market making” rather than a “bookmaking platform”, wherein we encourage the players to win instead of trying to balance the books by moving betting lines throughout the day. SteemSports uses fixed morning spreads and does not change them, which reduces the risk of play considerably.
As a blockchain service, we don’t support censorship and “sharp” players who often banned for always winning against traditional betting houses are always welcome on our platform. We take a standard 3% commission on all predictions and let the market seed the pools, this keeps our risk and commissions low. Further commission and pool seeding incentives will be rolled out in future.
Hedging of outcomes is also allowed as well as unlimited PAY PLAYS with various amounts right up to game closing time. There are no fixed winning odds such as 1:1 or 4:1, rather there is no ceiling to how much can be won. For example, if a particular prediction is heavily weighted to one side and a player chooses the less played outcome, it is not unlikely to win 100 or 1000 times one’s bet in a market with a weighted bias.
Traditional gaming sites often have up to two days’ delay in the withdrawl of funds process whereas SteemSports pays out immediately to the players’ Steem blockchain wallets once the prediction has been finalized. Inter-player account transfers are also free and instant.
Lastly SteemSports hosts a wealth of engaging content, pre-game synopsis and statistics which make the featured Prediction Games come alive and bridges the gap between a cold wagering odds based website and vibrant sports content publishers.
What is Steem and why did SteemSports decide to integrate its Prediction Market Gaming platform with the Steem blockchain?
Steem is a Digital Currency, much like bitcoin. The Steem blockchain is a derivative of Bitshares (BTS) Graphene technology which has been adapted into a social media blockchain, with a beta social frontend, [Steemit.com](http://steemit.com), released by the core development team in early 2016.
SteemSports selected the Steem blockchain because of its unique social community aspect, transactional speed, as well as its crowdfunding and consensus mechanics.
Steem already has a consensus voting feature, it was mostly used to give content writers rewards from the blockchain via a daily pool distributed to the most upvoted content.
SteemSports initially bootstrapped its project around the blog structure directly within Steemit.com, using the vanilla voting system to allow players to vote on sports and prediction game outcomes. It evolved with a custom web application to process transactions and distribute “FREE” winnings from post upvote rewards to the voters in Steem Power which is a gamification token on Steem, these tokens are convertible to a liquid digital currency on a weekly basis across a 3 month conversion period.
We have recently introduced PAY PLAYS with real Digital Currency pool based Prediction Games using the Steem blockchain to facilitate transactions and will be offering most games in this format with only featured games having FREE PLAYS options.
The unique thing about Steem is that the blockchain is designed to hold written content data, which makes for easy content creation and publishing. The community had already drawn talented, like-minded writers and developers onto the platform to help bootstrap our project with the common passion for sport and a goal of growing the value and utility of the Steem currency.