BetDEX Exchange
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BetDEX Labs
BetDEX Labs is a blockchain-based sports betting startup aiming to provide a decentralised, secure, and licensed platform for users worldwide. The company’s goal is to disrupt the traditional sports betting industry by leveraging blockchain technology to create a more efficient and trustless betting experience, eliminating intermediaries and giving users greater control over their bets and funds.
The Problem
Sports betting is an absolutely massive business, no one knows the exact number but estimates of global handle are over $1 trillion/year. Yet consumers are still getting charged insanely high prices of 5%+ to place a simple wager.
Even more importantly, sports betting businesses have not competed on product in the last 20 years largely due to big players in the industry having no incentive to innovate.
Traditional sportsbooks are too focused on inefficiently gaining market share in a burgeoning industry with advertising dollars, while international organisations have an inherent liquidity moat that has been built up over the years. Product simply falls by the wayside, why invest in R&D when you already have customers, albeit largely unhappy ones.
Early ideation sessions were key to forming our value prop
The Goal
The goal of the project was to create a fully licensed sports betting exchange on top of an open sourced decentralised sports betting protocol, one of the first of its kind.
The protocol would function as the back-end infrastructure for the exchange, built on the Solana blockchain to allow for instantaneous transactions at a negligible cost to the consumer — the protocol will charge a fee of <1% on net winnings.
While the exchange itself would function as a non-custodial medium to interact with the protocol, allowing users to quickly and easily bet on their favourite sports and events, all while remaining non-custodial and never holding user funds.
Catering to both crypto native and regular sports bettors was a key goal early in the project
Research
Frequent testing was a major part of the process throughout the project, and also one of it’s key challenges. In the projects early stages, because we were designing without an already established user base we utilised a third party platform called Prolific, to provide us with a panel of users based on a series of criteria relating to sports betting and web3 experience, that we then used to form user personas and run prototype testing sessions utilising Maze.
Given the nature of BetDEX as a startup, and only having 2 product designers on the project to start, it also meant we investigated significant time establishing our research processes to ensure we were making as informed decisions as possible, while doing our best to avoid bias as a result of the team’s industry experience. As the project progressed and we moved from a Beta to MVP launch, we slowly transitioned to interviewing and testing with real users to better inform our research efforts.
Competitor analysis formed a key part of our research
Design
Time spent working on similar applications previously in my career was invaluable from the very beginning of the project, similarly I was also fortunate enough to be working alongside a stellar team, many of whom I had worked with previously. This allowed us to pick things up from where we left off in the past from a process perspective, and get moving quickly.
However, while I had experience in the sportsbook world, designing a peer-to-peer exchange meant a whole other level of complexity on top of what I was used to, and proved to be a fundamental challenge throughout the design of the project.
Another key challenge for the team was designing a product built on web3 technologies, namely the Solana blockchain. While this brought with it many big advantages such as rapid transaction times, transparency, and non-custodial wallets, many of which were fundamental to our value proposition, it also led to a lot of key constraints such as sign up and KYC, rendering data from the blockchain, and licensing which informed a lot of design decisions and directions we had to take.
Initially, the team identified the core functionalities of the app and addressed them through a series of iterative workshops, low-fidelity design work, and rapid testing to validate decisions. By breaking down the app's functionality into manageable pieces and testing each element individually, the team was able to make informed design decisions in what was largely a unique product proposition.
Homescreen, leaderboards, and my trades sections of the product
Challenges
Designing the BetDEX exchange presented several challenges throughout the duration of the project. One of the biggest hurdles was acquiring a full gaming license, which required navigating complex regulatory frameworks and ensuring compliance with local laws.
Additionally, the exchange needed to implement a sign-up and Know Your Customer (KYC) process, which proved to be a significant barrier for users in the web3 space who traditionally prefer to remain anonymous. The development team also faced technical constraints as they worked to build the exchange on a new and largely untested blockchain, which required extensive testing and troubleshooting to ensure a smooth user experience.
In addition to the aforementioned challenges, the team also had to establish efficient processes to manage product development while ensuring a healthy work-life balance for the team. This meant balancing the need for speed with the desire to maintain high product quality, which required a careful balance of design and development demands.
Sign up and KYC proved to be a fundamental challenge
Results
The initial beta launch of the BetDEX Exchange saw lower than expected user numbers, but the team gained a wealth of key learnings from this experience. We used these learnings to refine our MVP, including a reworked sign-up flow that focused on wallet connection and saw a much higher completion rate as a result.
We also drastically improved navigation in accordance with an expansion of sport and event offerings, which directly correlated with an increase in both first-time and return bettors on the site.
Next steps on the project are focused on improving KPI’s centred around average session time, speed to bet, and frequency of bets through initiatives such as leaderboards and a promotions hub.
