Azuro Raises $4M for ‘Decentralized Sportsbook Protocol’

Azuro, a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) building a protocol for blockchain-based betting, announced Monday it has raised a $4 million funding round.

Hypersphere, Gnosis, Merit Circle, Quiet Capital and Formless Capital were all participants in the round.

The ultimate goal of the project is to replace traditional bookmakers like sportsbooks, which are often perceived as predatory and profit motivated, to disrupt the $200 billion betting industry.

The protocol taps prediction markets, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), DAO governance and liquidity pools on its back end in a bid to minimize the associated costs of the betting process for users. The project lives in the Gnosis Chain and went live on its mainnet earlier in June.

“The problem is incentive misalignment,” Rossen Yordanov, a core contributor to the project, said in a press release. “Profits are zero-sum so many betting companies go to great lengths to create unfair and opaque environments for the players.”

The funding brings the project’s total fundraising to $7.5 million, with AllianceDAO, Arrington Capital, Ethereal Ventures and Delphi Digital having led its $3.5 million raise in January.

The blockchain-based betting industry has remained fledgling despite its promising foundation, with no clear front-runner having emerged. Legal implications, as always, continue to loom over the sector’s mainstream adoption, though insiders of the industry are optimistic about its future legality.

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