Blockchain Betting Platform Product Roadmap and Strategy Plan

 

The roadmap has been bucketed into three specific, thematic upgrades. Every quarter, one specific aspect of the X platform will be optimized. There are three core thematic upgrades and objectives that we’ll be focusing on:

• 🤝 The Conversion Upgrade: Optimize X platform for sustainable growth.

• 📈 The Trading Upgrade: Grow volumes by turning betting into trading.

• 🌊 The Liquidity Upgrade: Become the world’s most liquid betting market.

Each of these upgrades works on a different vector of X Bet and X Network. The goal of these upgrades is for X to become even more economically sustainable, highly liquid, and represent the best place in the world to trade sports, politics, and crypto events. X has the potential to be one of the most successful blockchain projects. Time to get after it.

🤝 The Conversion Upgrade (Q1)

The first suite of upgrades will focus entirely on better converting new users into bettors. Our current user funnel looks like a clogged hourglass ⏳:

1. ✅ Great traffic

2. ❌ Bad conversion

3. ✅ Great retention & monetization

Conversion is a simple formula: user motivation minus product friction = conversion. X has taken steps to address product friction with the new, slick deposit flow released in November:

It’s time to tackle the former — user motivation —  with rewards and a new UI to remind everyone why X is the best platform in the world for bettors. The conversion upgrade is all about turning X into an incredibly efficient, sustainably growing machine.

💰Welcome Bonus 2.0

First, X will be relaunching the new user welcome bonus! Welcome bonuses are a key part of incentivizing new users to try out the platform and are commonly used by traditional sportsbooks to entice users to their platform.

The first $1,000 welcome bonus launched by X was incredibly attractive and helped get new users to the platform. Over 400 users took advantage of the welcome bonus in the few weeks that it was live. Unfortunately, it was a little too attractive and ended up being sybil attacked. The core problem was that the 10% unlock rate was higher than the 2% exchange fees, making it highly profitable for malicious users to game the program.

The new Welcome Bonus 2.0 solves this by matching the unlock rate with the average fee paid, making it unprofitable for malicious users to game the promotion.

🎮 Gamified Onboarding

X’s new gamified onboarding feature incentivizes users to engage with X by paying them small rewards for completing different tasks. It is a series of modules with accompanying video tutorials in which users unlock rewards for completing tasks. Tasks would include things such as:

• Complete Verification — Earn a $10 Bet Credit

• Win 5 Bets — Earn a $50 Bet Credit

• Stake 1,000 SX — Earn a 100 SX bonus

This feature will be an entertaining way for new users to earn rewards, gain status, and try out the site for free.

X Bet Product Landing Page

Web apps like X Bet are not treated well by search engines, which has been hurting X on the SEO front. Web apps are limited by their very design in how much information can be shown to a new user.

To solve this, it’s finally time to unveil a new X Bet product landing page. New users will be forwarded to an information-rich website and X Bet will benefit from improved SEO.

The main landing page will remain; it’s a landing page for people looking for information on the broader X Network ecosystem. The X Bet landing page will be purely there for potential X Bet bettors. There are a number of blockchain apps with nicely designed product landing pages to take inspiration from, such as dYdX and GMX.

⛏️ Bet Mining 3.0

Bet mining is one of the most unique features of X. Community ownership is the core ethos of the entire X project.

However, bet mining is currently far too much of a secret for both our existing users and for new people to the platform. The UI of bet mining hasn’t changed since it was launched 2 years ago, and it’s time for a major refresh. Some of the things that will be improved:

• Claimable Rewards: Bet mining rewards will become manually claimable, meaning that they’ll accrue over time and will have to be claimed ie. they won’t automatically be deposited to your wallet. This added bit of friction will make the experience feel a lot more “real” and add much-needed transparency to the weekly rewards.

• Estimated X Bonus to Every Bet Slip: Every bet slip will now have an estimated bet mining bonus so people get a visceral sense every time they place a bet of how much X they are earning:

• New Design: The user interface of X will be newly re-designed to make it easier for users to understand the benefits of bet mining by showing the rate at which rewards are being distributed. For example, if you place a $1,000 bet, you will win ~105 X in bet mining rewards based on last week’s rate:

📈 The Trading Upgrade (Q2)

X is currently the best blockchain sports betting platform in the world. However, X is currently a pure betting platform rather than a true exchange; users cannot trade in and out of positions the way they can with traditional betting exchanges.

The trading upgrade is entirely focused on making X the best place in the world to trade sports, politics, and crypto events. The upgrade will increase betting volume and liquidity by turning X from a betting platform into a betting exchange. This upgrade consists of three core features: Cashout, Exotic Crypto Markets, and Novelty markets.

💵 Cashout

The Cashout feature will enable users to sell out of their bets prior to settlement. This radically increases the flexibility of X; users can now cash out of a bet that they no longer like, lock in profits or losses on a bet if the line moves, etc.

This will make it more feasible to have long-dated markets on X as bettors won’t be locked into their positions until settlement.

Cashout will turn X from a betting site into a trading site. It will improve the user experience dramatically, and increase turnover and betting volume.

📉 Exotic Crypto Markets

X’s Crypto Price Markets (CPM) are currently quite limited, with just a few markets per week to bet on. Yet, they still see relatively high activity with almost $1m bet on them this year alone. X currently hosts only 8–10 weekly price markets on BTC and ETH.

With the cashout upgrade making it easier to trade in and out of positions, it’s the perfect time to substantially upgrade our CPMs with markets on:

1. Daily BTC and ETH markets

2. Markets on all top 100 crypto

3. NFT floor price markets

These markets will tap into a premium price feed in order to securely create and resolve markets. We expect this to 100x the number of CPMs that are offered on X Bet. 🍿 Novelty Markets

• “Will Elon Musk be CEO of Twitter at the end of 2023?”

• “Will Binance become insolvent by January 31st?”

• “Will Ethereum be deflationary in 2023?”

These are some of the novelty betting markets that — while not large volume drivers — are incredibly high-visibility within the crypto community. The key to these markets is creating a systematic way to create and settle these markets. Entirely new betting markets that have never been systematically created before could include:

• Crypto network markets (gas fees, hashrate, etc.)

• DeFi-native markets (protocol insurance, TVL, liquidity, etc.)

• Political, geopolitical, and macroeconomic markets

🌊 The Liquidity Upgrade (Q3)

This upgrade is entirely focused on increasing the liquidity of X by increasing the depth of bet offers available and tightening the spread between them. By increasing liquidity, X becomes a far more attractive destination for bettors and allows X to handle larger “whale” bettors that make large bets.

💱 Combined Order Book

There are currently three different betting currencies on X: USDC, ETH, and WSX. Each currency lives in its own isolated liquidity pool. Bettors looking to find the best odds, have to switch between currencies to surface the best liquidity. The bettor then has to have the appropriate balance of the requisite currency or swap into it, in order to then place the bet. The combined order book aggregates each betting currency into one, global order book. This enables a number of new functions:

1. Users can quickly see which betting currency has the best liquidity

2. Users can hit multiple orders across multiple currencies at once

3. Users can bet into any currency liquidity pool with one click

The combined order book concentrates all currency liquidity into one single order book. It enables X to massively scale the number of currencies that people can bet with. 💶 New Betting Currencies X has been hesitant to add new currencies to bet with in the past due to the fear of fragmenting liquidity. With the combined order book, new currencies are additive to liquidity, not subtractive. Thus, we can aggressively add new currencies to bet with.

The list of currencies we’re currently targeting include:

• MATIC

• FRAX / MAI

• WBTC

And many, many more. The initial focus will be on major stablecoins and DeFi projects in the Polygon ecosystem.

🔗 Cross-Chain Betting

One of the largest drawbacks of building out a dedicated app chain is that it creates friction for users with assets on other blockchains that want to access the platform. The goal with cross-chain betting is to enable anyone, from any chain, to place a bet on X Bet, while avoiding fragmentation by having all bets settle on X Network. Going cross-chain in this fashion enables X to take advantage of different integrations and business partnerships while maintaining the advantages of our own app chain. There are three huge advantages of this approach: concentrated liquidity, seamless onboarding, and business integrations. The way this works is that users bet on any chain they wish and the funds are then automatically bridged over in real-time to settle up. On the back-end, X utilizes its bet-on-behalf functionality (which currently powers the Bet Credits feature), while simultaneously bridging funds from the users’ chain to X Network. This enables users to make bets from any chain they want, with the bet funds being paid out on X Network. Some of the chains we’d look to integrate first include:

• Polygon

• Optimism

• Arbitrum

• BSC

• Avalanche

There are +50 EVM chains that are currently live in production that X could integrate into the platform.

There are a number of infrastructure and maintenance upgrades coming down the pipeline in Q1 that will help the platform function better. These come up sporadically throughout the year — often through community feedback — and will be prioritized over other additive features. This makes them hard to predict ahead of time. However, they are still a key part of making the X platform easier to use. Some of the maintenance features and bug fixes being worked on at the moment include:

• 🌉 Fast-exit bridge from X Network to Polygon

• 🪂 Automatic X airdrop to users bridging to X Network

• 🏦 Fiat on-ramp built directly into X Network

• 👝 Support for Coinbase Wallet, Trust Wallet, Ledger, & other wallets

• ✅ Status indicator for bets that fail to mine for whatever reason

Finally, there are a number of product features and new markets that will be released throughout the year. These will be added throughout the year depending on timing, priority and bandwidth. These include:

• 🏟️ Team prop markets for NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, and Soccer

• 🥊 Method of victory markets for UFC

• 📊 Alternative lines for NBA, NHL, NFL, MLB, and Soccer

• ⛹️‍♂️ Limited player prop markets for NBA, NFL, and MLB

• 🤝 Shareable bet offers and bet slips

This list represents all features that can be currently launched and shouldn’t be considered exhaustive by any means. There are a number of other extremely exciting product and market upgrades that are currently in the ideation phase and haven’t been mentioned. As they move from idea to design, we’ll be sure to share them with the community. The goal for 2023 X product development is simple: keep our heads down and extend our technological lead as the largest blockchain betting platform in the world. We’re extremely excited for 2023, and we hope the community is as well.