AgoraBet is a DeFi app bringing decentralized bets on Stellar: fast, secure, owned by its users and developers, and no human interaction such as judges slowing the market’s workflow. Given the large amount of information required to give a full overview of the project, we’ll only introduce the key concepts and general workflow of the application and its governance. A complete overview of the project will be found in our whitepaper, which we have decided not to publish yet, since we are too early in development for that.

The global online gambling market is anticipated to be valued at more than 92.9 billion U.S. dollars in 2023 (https://www.statista.com/statistics/270728/market-volume-of-online-gaming-worldwide/), and centralized platforms suffer from risks directly caused by centralization such as high fees, lack of transparency, delayed payments, fallacious security. On the other hand, we understand that current decentralized prediction markets disrupt the simple workflow that users find in centralized platforms. In fact, there won’t be judges in our protocol besides our smart contracts, thus removing human judges or oracles for a more trustworthy experience.

But how can smart contracts decide on their own which are the winners?They will use sources that are trusted by the protocol through governance. A more technical approach will be described in the whitepaper. The important concept, however, is that the anatomy of the market upon which users are betting is already described in the smart contracts, making them able to discern winners depending on the results given from the trusted sources (i.e trusted APIs). Furthermore, to tackle the problem of the centralized nature of sources, a market allows for multiple sources to determine the outcome of an event (similarly to stellar turrets).

The DeFi app will be run by our innovative governance protocol, which brings interesting concepts (vote weighting by distribution and others) enabling AgoraBet to run smoothly without risking takeover attacks (how we do this will be well-described in the whitepaper) while allowing users and developers decide which features and markets to add to the protocol. Additionally, the protocol offers rewards to those who are using it, by distributing protocol fees to the holders of our tokens: user’s and developer’s ones.