Betting on the World Cup Final…with Ethereum

Tomorrow morning at 10 am EST the eyes of the world will turn to Russia as France and Croatia duke it out in the final game of the World Cup.

The last World Cup in 2014 was watched by almost 3.2 billion people and the world’s population has grown by almost half a billion since then. That makes tomorrow’s event the most watched global event by any estimate.

sports fan knows, with mass coverage comes mass gambling. This year world cup gambling is expected to make bookies a profit of more than $36 billion. While most of this gambling is going to take place in fiat, at least some will take place in crypto. Gambling with crypto is not a new phenomenon, and gambling ICO’s dominated ICO funding last summer. Most of these platforms are not live yet but are expected to bring in massive amounts of capital and even pump prices of coins like Binance Coin and Ethereum used to bet on events.

One platform that is live and accepting bets in cryptocurrency is called CryptoBets. It’s the evolution of the CryptoBowl platform we reported on earlier this year which allowed users to place bets in Ethereum on events like the Superbowl. What I found interesting about CryptoBets, and still find intriguing is the simplicity of the whole thing. It’s simply an open source Ethereum smart contract that checks football-data.org to decide a winner. There’s no complex ICO, no tokens to buy (other than Ethereum). There CryptoBowl wager ended up with nearly $25,000 worth of Ethereum in the pot.