Azuro Raises $3.5 Million to Build the Base Layer for Decentralized Betting

Azuro has announced the successful closure of its seed round. The project claims to have raised $3.5 million from participating institutional investors including Gnosis, Flow Ventures, Polymorphic Capital, Arrington XRP, and Ethereal Ventures, amongst others. Azuro is aiming to disrupt web2 sports betting with its trustless and permissionless system powered by web3.

Bringing Decentralized Betting to the World

Azuro Protocol, an open-source blockchain project aiming to usher in the next era of decentralized betting, has successfully raised $3.5 million from venture capitalist firms and its strategic partners that participated in its seed round.

According to the Azuro team, the funding round was led by Gnosis, Flow Ventures, and Polymorphic Capital, with participation from names like Ethereal Ventures, Arrington XRP Capital, AllianceDAO, Delphi Digital, Meta Cartel Ventures, Merit Circle, and Clever Advertising.

Other VC firms that participated in the funding round include SevenX, OP Crypto, CitizenX, BR Capital, Chainlink’s David Post, IDEX’s Alex Wearn, and Sergei Chan. Azuro says the unwavering support gotten from its new partners whose backgrounds range from web3, DeFi, GameFi, traditional betting is a strong indication that it’s on the right path.

“The support we’ve got is indicative of our ambitions – to disrupt web2 sports betting with a trustless, permissionless proposition, and to create the new betting layer on top of web3 with totally new use cases and functionality,” wrote Azuro.

Succeeding Where Others Failed 

Azuro says it encountered difficulties while speaking to potential partners and investors in its decentralized betting ecosystem, with several entities expressing their skepticisms over the viability of the project, due to the fact that a host of decentralized betting platforms have either failed or are struggling to survive.

However, the team says it was finally able to garner support from investors who “have an appreciation that betting is a solvable problem on-chain, and that if the right approach is taken both technically and from a go-to-market and regulatory perspective – the prize will be absolutely huge.”

Azuro has outlined a number of factors limiting the growth of existing decentralized betting platforms like Augur, Polymarket, and others, including lack of liquidity, product depth, poor UX, and more.

Azuro has made it clear that it plans to overcome the above drawbacks by introducing a new liquidity provision system where core liquidity is provided by a common pool rather than individual pools that are event and market-specific, fresh market creation and liquidity allocation features that create betting odds for events using real-world, live betting data and more.

What’s more, Azuro says its decentralized betting architecture makes it possible for the platform to support all the features available on centralized sportsbooks, enabling players to place accumulator bets, and bet on events with multiple outcomes instead of the usual YES/NO limitation of prediction markets.

Importantly, Azuro is designed to function as the base layer holding all liquidity, while consumer interactions happen on the front-end platforms built on top of Azuro. 

“This approach ‘outsources’ much of the direct-to-consumer efforts and relieves Azuro from most of the regulatory, KYC, legal and operational lift, enabling Azuro to fuel the boom of decentralized betting, with multiple front-ends (customer-facing websites or apps) utilizing the liquidity, odds, risk management, and settlement provided by the protocol,” Azuro explains.