SX Master Plan: Rebranding, Expanding, And Solving The Governance Problem

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The first SX master plan was released in December 2019 – an internal document shared to the SX team and early investors. It consisted of a simple vision and mission based on two beliefs:

1. Crypto adoption is going to accelerate

2. Crypto-based betting will therefore see massive upticks in demand

SX mission is to become the dominant hub for crypto-based betting

Later on in the document, a simple prospective strategy to capitalize on this vision laid out:

1. Launch early & semi-centralized, then iterate fast
2. Aggressively aggregate the demand-side (i.e. users)
3. Use dominant demand-side to aggregate supply-side (market-makers)
4. Use success to launch token & aggregate staking-side (validators)
5. Use staking community to decentralize and aggregate developers

This strategy consisted of shipping new technology and rapidly iterating while gaining a dominant market position by quickly growing our community. Then using this dominant community to eventually attract market-makers, validators, and third-party developers.

Over the last 30 months, SX achieved these goals to a large extent. SX is now the largest blockchain betting market in the world by volume, with $170m in total bets since inception.

It is also the most liquid, offering deep depth in three separate currencies across more than 500 prediction markets per day. SX has a large staking community, with hundreds of SX holders staking a total of 57,738,446 SX, which represents ~$20m in total value.

Finally, SX has a rapidly growing ecosystem of developers, with 25 different 3rd party teams building protocols and apps on SX Network (that we’re excited to begin announcing in the coming weeks!).

However, with all this growth, SX team has consistently been getting feedback from people both inside and outside the community that there was a narrative problem.

This was compounded by the fact that there were essentially two separate brands (SportX and SX Network). SportX no longer makes sense as a brand, both because the SX brand is stronger but also because SX has begun expanding beyond sports into new types of prediction markets.

With that in mind, this is the perfect time to unify into one core brand — SX. Thus, SportX is officially now, SX.Bet!

The work is far from over. With the rapid growth in the overall crypto asset class, there are more competitors and new challenges facing SX every day. Here is what the SX team is planning on doing to reach the next level in their evolution:

Expand the number of prediction markets by 20x

SX offers far more markets than other blockchain competitors, with more than +500 different prediction markets settled per day across almost every sport as well as a number of crypto-native verticals.

However, SX still lags centralized competitors by a wide margin, with most traditional betting platforms offering +10,000 markets per day and covering almost every sport.

Beyond increasing sports coverage, there is a huge opportunity to expand SX into new types of crypto-native prediction markets — NFTs, DeFi, and even governance decisions.

The first step to cementing SX as the hub of crypto-based betting will be to 20x the number of markets offered to bring it in line with traditional competitors. The next step after that will be to surpass that by creating new types of crypto-native markets that are only available in SX ecosystem.

Looking longer-term, SX can greatly expand market selection even more by decentralizing market creation itself.

By opening up market creation to the community, SX could enable an explosion in market creation. In the future, spinning up a prediction market on SX could be as easy as creating a token on Ethereum.

Build a network of liquidity sharing prediction markets

SX.Bet concentrates liquidity into one central location in order to provide a platform for users to find the best odds and depth. A network of market makers competes on SX.Bet to offer better odds and depth.

This leads to better prices for bettors as compared to most traditional bookmakers and betting exchanges. Liquidity begets itself; it flows to the most liquid platform.

The next step in the evolution path is to aggregate liquidity onto SX by building a network of other blockchain prediction markets that share liquidity with each other.

Through liquidity sharing, the SX protocol can become the global trade route for betting markets to tap into. This will lead to new types of innovations like betting exchange aggregators, arbitrage bots, and much, much more.

Cryptocurrency wallet Exodus was the first project to integrate SX Protocol directly into their wallet app back in November 2021.

The partnership enables Exodus’ more than 1 million users access to SX’s betting liquidity where they can place bets on a wide range of markets directly from the comfort of the Exodus app.

There are a host of other platforms looking to follow by building their own in-app betting markets utilizing the SX Protocol as well.

Build an ecosystem of supporting DeFi and NFT apps

SX was initially deployed on the Ethereum blockchain, before becoming one of the first applications to launch on the Polygon PoS blockchain back in September 2020.

This transition to Polygon PoS enabled the SX ecosystem to thrive. However, in the summer of 2021, the SX core team noticed a number of long-term risks and limitations as a function of being on Polygon PoS.