SBC News Voice of the Sports Betting Industry
Crypto sports betting exchange BetDEX remains faithful in the continued stability of its operations as well as international crypto and crypto betting markets, despite recent instability.
Currently under beta testing, BetDEX is a next-generation betting exchange built on Solana rails – Solana is a blockchain majority funded by Alameda Research, the affiliated quantitative trading firm and VC fund of FTX, that entered murky financial waters this week.
FTX’s activities in recent years have been indicative of increasing convergence between the crypto and betting sectors, having co-led a funding round for BetDEX in November 2021 alongside Paradigm.
“Trading on BetDEX is in USDT, we hold minimal SOL, so we expect to see very limited impact,” said Varun Sudhakar, BetDEX CEO, in a statement issued to SBC.
“In terms of the investment side, we completed our seed round in November 2021, when a series of investors supported the round, led by Paradigm alongside FTX and others.”
BetDEX’s Twitter activity suggests that the company is still backing Solana, however, sharing a thread from Solana Labs Co-Founder Anatoly ‘TOLY’ Yakovenko, who described the builders of the blockchain as ‘second to none’.
Solana's still the only chain that can make BetDEX fly. Mainnet soon. https://t.co/3g6TjZtNxI
— BetDEX (@BetDEXLabs) November 9, 2022
Global crypto markets took a turn for the worst this week, amid widespread uncertainty about the stability of FTX, a prominent crypto-exchange.
This began when CoinDesk revealed last week that Alameda solely relied upon the success of FTX’s native token FTT, as opposed to a more stable source of currency such as fiat or another cryptocurrency.
As cryptocurrency has become increasingly interlinked with the betting industry – demonstrated by FTX’s interest in the latter as well as the rise of firms such as Coingaming – a ripple effect could well be underway.
Regarded in crypto circles as the world’s second largest platform, FTX entered murky waters earlier this week when a mass offloading from Binance of FTT s led to a ‘liquidity crunch’.
A potential buyout of FTX by its larger rival Binance did little to calm uncertainty, whilst the latter has now announced that it will not pursue an acquisition, citing due diligence and allegations of ‘mishandled customer funds’ and ‘US agency investigation’.
A venture of former FanDuel Co-Founder Nigel Eccles, in 2021 BetDEX announced that it had raised $21m in the aforementioned funding round, executing the biggest seed funding round by a British start-up.
FTX and other investors backed BetDEX’s mission to create the “world’s first decentralised sports betting protocol”, delivering the lowest transactional costs, transparent and fast-scale benefits of Solana blockchain to global betting consumers. 
Capital from the seed funding round has been used to establish BetDEX’s engineering team led by Stuart Tonner as Chief Technology Officer (CTO) whilst Varun Sudhakar provides general oversight as CEO, with both being former senior managers at FanDuel.
Based in Edinburgh and New York, the group intends to imminently launch the first version of the decentralised betting exchange by the start of the World Cup, having become the first operator of its type to secure an Isle of Man gaming licence last month.
