Jan 20, 2022

TechBullion Azuro, a decentralized protocol, announces a successful $3.5 million seed round funding led by top VCs, traditional betting companies, and blockchain-based betting firms. Announced Tuesday, Azuro, a blockchain-based predictions market, publicized the latest $3.5 million seed funding round to help develop their platform and revolutionize the world of betting. The seed funding round attracted some of the top VCs in crypto including Gnosis, Flow Ventures, and Polymorphic Capital, who led the funding round. Other top investors in the round included Ethereal Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital, AllianceDAO (a.k.a. DeFi Alliance), Clever Advertising, Delphi Digital, Meta Cartel Ventures, Merit Circle among other VCs and angel investors. According to the release , Azuro plans to use the funds to revolutionize the Web2 (or traditional) betting market and revive the stale decentralized betting market. Despite first making an appearance in the blockchain world in 2017, the decentralized betting market has stagnated due to the lack of deep liquidity, skepticism, and mistrust on these betting platforms despite the projects having brilliant developers and a ready user base. Additionally, the decentralized betting market still faces stigma as a high barrier of entry industry, given the need for huge capital, regulation barriers, and geographical restrictions. Azuro, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) focused on the democratization and innovation in betting, aims to provide a lasting solution that will recover what was once a thriving decentralized betting market. The platform aims to solve the persisting problem of liquidity, user experience, and product depth to build a new and totally different decentralized betting market. The global betting market is expected to grow to a $95 billion market by 2023, and blockchain is expected to lead the growth, especially with the play-to-earn (P2E) industry growing at an explosive rate. Nonetheless, new blockchain-based betting projects still lack the features and solutions to solve the current problems facing the industry. While these new projects launch daily, many of them are just slight improvements on already existing platforms and some just rebranded as decentralized betting exchanges. As alluded to, one of the biggest problems facing current decentralized betting platforms is the lack of liquidity and inefficient liquidity allocation across the betting markets. With the latest funding, Azuro plans to solve this issue by introducing “pooled liquidity” in an effort to scale prediction markets. Users will pool their funds to provide liquidity and receive Azuro token rewards, meaning there will be constant liquidity provided, contrary to single liquidity providers on previously launched platforms. Unlike their competition,  liquidity providers (LPs) are not required to manually create markets and are not exposed to betting-market-specific risk. Instead, the risk is spread across all betting markets on the protocol, and therefore dramatically reduced for the LPs. The liquidity providers are then paid via the rewards from betting, meaning the LPs will “always” play house on the platform. Additionally, betting markets are created by linking real-world data to the platform through oracles removing the need for LPs to manually create the markets. Notably, gamblers on the platform will have a wide range of options to bet from rather than the conventional “Yes/No” limitation on many decentralized prediction markets. The easy UX on the platform also allows players to see their potential winnings before they place a bet. More importantly, bets on Azuro are non-fungible which also means there is no longer any need to buy and sell tokens to bet, the statement further reads. Lastly, the platform will also launch a DAO to allow players to have a say on the development and upgrades on the betting platform. Much fuss has been made on the significance of DAOs in today’s crypto industry but with its DAO, Azuro aims to reduce the regulation limitations and geographical barriers facing many potential players across the globe.