The Injective ecosystem is growing exponentially. As a blockchain that provides lightning fast transaction times, smart contracts capabilities, and plug-and-play financial primitives, an onslaught of developers have come on board to build and deploy groundbreaking applications.
To take users through each and every dApp built on Injective, Injective Labs is launching the “Injective Ecosystem Spotlight” series to introduce community members to new projects. Each spotlight will not only showcase the product, but will also shine light on who the team is, , how the product works, why they chose Injective and what they are able to bring to the larger Injective community.
In this first “Injective Ecosystem Spotlight,” we are excited to feature Frontrunner, the first decentralized sports prediction app built on Injective, which has been selected for the CoinList Seed Fall 2022 cohort!
What is Frontrunner?
Frontrunner is a decentralized sports prediction market built on Injective where users can buy shares of sports propositions and then trade them like options, contracts or stocks.
Unlike traditional sports books where users place a bet and wait, Frontrunner gives users full control over their portfolios, allowing them to dynamically buy and sell positions as the odds change. You can sell high to cash out your profits or sell low to mitigate your losses. The transactions on Injective are fast and gas free.
By leveraging the power of free markets and the Injective blockchain, Frontrunner creates transparent markets and liquid positions to reduce counter-party risk and fundamentally change the way that people invest in their sports knowledge and beliefs.
Background on Sports Betting
Sports betting means you bet on the outcomes of a certain sports event. You will win a set amount of money if the team or player you bet on wins, otherwise you lose. It is a popular industry with a long history and keeps growing nowadays. According to Grand View Research, the global sports betting market size was valued at $76.75 billion in 2021, and is anticipated to grow at a rate of 10.2% from 2022 to 2030.
However, people are complaining about the centralization issue of sports betting entities. These entities get a huge cut of the money you wagered, limit the amount you can win on a particular day, and just overall have the control of your money which has been deposited into their centralized accounts.
The decentralized sports prediction app built on blockchain technology, like Frontrunner, completely revolutionizes the way sports betting works. It allows users to operate independently of any centralized authority, place a bet quickly and easily with low fees, and most importantly, you keep 100% of your winnings!
What’s more, on a traditional sports betting app, users typically will open the app, place the bet and put their phone down and watch the game. However on Frontrunner, users are buying shares of a team or player while the price takes up and down over the course of a game in a season. It creates constantly actionable and monetizable moments for all users, as they can trade in and out as their opinions change at any time until the result is determined.
Frontrunner Is Live on Injective Testnet
Utilizing Injective's CosmWasm and binary options support, Frontrunner launched its beta on Injective's testnet with a PRESEASON Trading Competition Series in July 2022. A large number of beta testers participated in Frontrunner's trading competition to get access to a $20,000 prize pool.
So far, Frontrunner has supported 30+ sports betting markets ranging from major sports leagues including NFL markets, Premier League markets, MLB playoff markets, NBA markets and the most recent World Cup markets!
The early results on testnet have been very promising and showed signs of high user engagement. The testnet has been hugely successful already with users logging an average 35 minutes of activity, compared to just 12.5 minutes on a traditional sportsbook (such as DraftKings). The typical user places around 39 orders, indicating consistent trading activity over the course of one game.
Team Background
Frontrunner was founded in 2021 by a team of four co-founders: Neil, Eric, Brian and Nillan. Their experience spans small startups to large enterprise institutions, and with industry spanning sports, web3 and financial institutions.
Why Build on Injective?
Frontrunner is the first team to utilize and integrate Injective’s binary options module to their platform.
“We really love Injective’s native support on the central limit order book (CLOB) infrastructure. A lot of other prediction market products in the decentralized world use AMMs, which are super capital inefficient and unsustainable. The native support of order book, fast and low fees for transactions can give us a jump-off point to focus on building on the betting product rather than the smart contract layer and underlying infrastructure layer,” says Neil Zhang, co-founder and CEO of Frontrunner.
“The addition of binary options contracts is absolutely huge for us, because it allows us to quickly launch markets that are analogous to what your bettors are used to in the sports betting world, but presenting it to the new DeFi user group. It allows us to create different types of markets that are really fun and engaging for sports fans and traders alike. ”
What Will Frontrunner Bring to the Community?
As a unique application of the Injective ecosystem, Frontrunner not only brings best-in-class products which are beneficial to users, but also adds up additional use cases for INJ.
In terms of user base, Frontrunner will promote its product along with Injective to a much larger audience group. Among all the sports fans in the world, there’s still only a small portion of people who really know how to trade derivatives or even understand crypto. You can imagine a much more mainstream audience being able to be exposed to Injective, onboard and start trading on Injective through Frontrunner’s betting applications.
From the exchange perspective, the trading fees collected on Frontrunner will still go to Injective’s buy back and burn auction mechanism, since it’s built on top of Injective’s order book module. It will accrue value for INJ token and make it even more deflationary.
What’s Next?
The team received some great feedback from the community after the initial beta launch. User feedback included which sports markets were most compelling, what types of markets users were most drawn to and even what types of financial instruments might excite users in the future (for example, Frontrunner tested markets in which users could short a player or a team).
As the team continues to push forward, Frontrunner plans to launch a mobile product in Q1 next year, and is in the process of securing some offshore gaming licenses that will allow Frontrunner to launch on mainnet and start operating as an actual sportsbook. The mainnet launch is scheduled for Q2 next year.
Useful Resources
Check out Frontrunner here to buy and sell shares of your favorite teams with crypto!
About Injective
Injective is a lightning fast interoperable layer one blockchain optimized for building the premier Web3 finance applications. Injective provides developers with powerful plug-and-play modules for creating unmatched dApps. INJ is the native asset that powers Injective and its rapidly growing ecosystem. Injective is incubated by Binance and is backed by prominent investors such as Jump Crypto, Pantera and Mark Cuban.
Website | Telegram | Discord | Blog | Twitter | Youtube | Facebook | LinkedIn | Reddit | Instagram | Orbit Newsletter