Dean
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Betbox is a unique new betting dapp (decentralized application) which introduces itself with the tagline ‘bet on everything, always and everywhere’.

In addition to playing lottery games, gambling games and betting on public events, Betbox users can also bet on private events and even create personal challenges for friends (and anybody else who is interested) to bet on. For example, in the alpha version which you can try out now by visiting their website, the team has created a challenge for themselves to form a human pyramid with at least 10 people and post a picture of it to their official Twitter account.

These personal challenges are a unique feature for Betbox which I haven’t seen elsewhere, and I am sure that some people will have a lot of fun with this. Various different challenges and dares have gone viral over the years and seen half of the world try them out, and this kind of thing always proves popular on social media. Having a fun way for friends to bet on whether you succeed, and some skin in the game allowing you to take home a little bit of money for doing your challenge, seems like a nice idea to me. Personally I’ve been thinking about trying to last 15 minutes in an ice bath, and it would be fun to see if my family or friends think I can do it.

The alpha version of the app itself, which works on Ethereum’s Ropsten testnet so that you can try it out without having to risk any real money is very basic and bare-bones. But I guess that is what you would expect from an alpha and it does go some way towards showing what it is all about and proving the concept.

On joining, users will get their own cryptocurrency wallet with the latest security to keep their assets safe. They will also be able to create a personal ‘live feed’ to stay up to date with what’s happening and what they can bet on according to their own preferences, without their dapp becoming cluttered with bets they aren’t interested in.

Individual bets can be placed just for you and your friends to participate in, or can be made public for anybody to join. Initially all of these wagers will be placed using cryptocurrency, but as the dapp develops they plan to also allow fiat payments.

Betbox seems to take decentralization seriously and to understand its benefits. As a decentralized app it manages customers’ funds using smart contracts. This means that users do not have to trust their funds to a third party or trust the service itself to resolve bets fairly and payout what is due – it all happens automatically. They also use the Verity decentralized oracle for determining which way a wager should be resolved (who wins the bet), further reducing the need for trust and eliminating potential for players to get ripped off.

The native cryptocurrency of the Betbox dapp will be 0X. This will be used for payments, as a staking currency for the ‘distributed proof of authority network’ (I suggest you read the whitepaper if you want to find out what that is) and to participate in certain features of the dapp. The use of 0X allows the dapp to run on a sidechain, which will allow it to scale up to larger numbers of users without running into the kind of problems that many of these dapps face. Although I’m not a programmer myself, they seem to be using the best and most advanced tech and to have taken time to pre-empt the most likely problems.

Anybody interested in making money (and let’s be honest, who isn’t?) can earn 0X with Betbox in a couple of different ways: by participating in the voting process or by setting up and completing a personal challenge, as I described earlier, to take home 10% of the jackpot. Of course they can also try their luck at the lottery or gambling games.

The ICO itself is somewhat unusual for crypto: it is a private pre-sale only available to accredited investors who are willing to go through the KYC / AML procedure and have at least 100 Eth to invest in the project.

Fortunately, however, those of us not lucky enough to have such vast wealth can also get a piece of the action. They have set up bounties with a pool of 0X rewards equal to the value of 1 Lambo (Lamborghini car), which is a nice humorous touch which references crypto culture. You can find more information about these from their telegram group.

By @profitofthegods