Degens

History of Degens? In 2011–2012 we built a system called SportCoin. It had several of what we consider the fundamental features of crypto betting exchanges. Users could bet with cryptocurrency, post their own odds, earn and withdraw realized profits before games even started, and trade conveniently from a web interface. However, SportCoin had one enormous flaw: It was entirely centralized. Users would have to send us bitcoin, which we would store in our wallet. When a user would like to withdraw, they’d just have to trust that we were securely holding their funds and would honestly fulfil their request. Really SportCoin was no better than incumbent exchanges like BetFair, except for the fact that users could use Bitcoin instead of fiat currency. This was an incremental improvement over the status quo, but not a categorical leap of any sort. Because of this we didn’t have much enthusiasm for the project and stopped work on SportCoin sometime mid-2012. Enter SportCrypt After Ethereum launched, we realized that it is the solution to many of the problems we saw in SportCoin. Rather than us being responsible for holding our users’ funds, this could be handled by a special program known as a “smart contract”. With a smart contract, even if we wanted to we would be unable to steal user funds held in balance. The mental model we like to use for smart contracts is to consider our database open and publicly accessible. Unlike centralized systems where access to the database must be diligently guarded, decentralized applications (“dapps”) turn this model inside-out. The database is accessible to everyone because it lives on a shared infrastructure known as the blockchain. Furthermore, users can interact with the database on their own terms, using their own software if they so prefer. This is a categorically new way of building systems and requires re-thinking many assumptions. For example, the entire concept of having accounts with passwords and recovery emails goes away, which greatly improves privacy (something often important for sports bettors). Similarly, because we aren’t accepting customer funds, it is no longer necessary to collect payment information or deal with chargebacks, fund transfer delays, payment processor freezes, compliance requirements, or the many other pitfalls of handling money. When we launched SportCrypt in 2017, we weren’t sure if anyone was going to use it. We had a clunky user interface, the way we handled data flow was slow and inefficient, and we had next to no tools for market makers, white-labels, arbitrageurs, or pro-users. But what happened exceeded our expectations. We’ve had millions of dollars worth of ETH traded, and have a growing set of users, many of whom really like the product. To all of you reading: THANK YOU! Your encouragement and feedback has kept us moving forward. We’ve learned a lot from building SportCrypt. First of all, the brand name isn’t ideal. Often it’s mis-typed as SportsCrypt or SportCrypto. What’s worse, there are tons of other sites named some combination of the words “Sports”, “Crypto”, and “Bet”. To help differentiate ourselves, we decided to create a new brand: Degens. This is a humorously self-deprecating term (short for “degenerates”) that originated in the poker and sports betting communities, and we feel it is a unique, fresh and fun name that will help our product stand out. Enter Degens Degens is a P2P sports betting exchange using DAI and operating on the ethereum blockchain. As a proud MakerDAO Community grants program grantee, Degens has been on the mainnet since 2017 with over $18,000,000 DAI exchanged. We believe Degens offers numerous benefits over legacy sports betting solutions such as: Lowest fees: Degens charges an industry low 0.5% fee on all winning bets. Anonymous: No personal information is ever requested and all bets are made 100% anonymously. No KYC and no geographical restrictions. Non custodial: Degens is non custodial. Instant deposits/withdrawals: Since players communicate directly with the smart contract, deposits and withdrawals are immediate. No longer must you wait 24-48 hours while your 'withdrawal is being processed.' Turnkey market making solution: Degens provides an open source, free to use market making bot so that you can be your own bookie and it requires no programming experience. While waiting for sports to resume, Degens has recently added eSports betting markets and is planning to offer political markets for the upcoming election in November.