How Big is the Crypto Sports Betting Industry?
Sports betting has been around for as long as these sports themselves. People place bets for different reasons, some might want to just have fun guessing scores and other results and give them some excitement by betting some money, while some bet with the sole purpose of winning money. Up until now most of this betting was done using traditional currencies such as USD and EUR, but with the recent rise of cryptocurrencies and its wide adaptation, crypto sports betting has gained huge popularity and soon might rival traditional sports betting.
Crypto adaptation to traditional betting
Bookmaker operators were one of the first to seize the advantage of cryptocurrencies. The first betting segment which adopted these cryptocurrencies was sports betting. It has brought huge advantages to both bookies and punters with anonymity and other crypto-specific features. One of the biggest advantages was the anonymity and decentralized nature of cryptos as punters who reside in countries where gambling is illegal are now able to easily enjoy sports betting and bookies don’t have to jump between different legal hoops to provide services in some parts of the world.
Just a few years ago the global sports betting industry was valued at $104 billion dollars and with the introduction of cryptocurrencies to the mix experts suggest that this number can grow up to $155 billion with an annual growth rate of 8.83%. This fast and expected growth has given opportunities to bookmakers to offer high-quality services more efficiently. Yet the regulation often remains the main obstacle for some bookmakers, this is why these crypto bookmakers are now appearing on the market and are able to offer top-notch services to their users without the risk of having their payments blocked, since such bookmakers mostly use cryptocurrencies for money operations.
There are many different factors that are contributing to this growth with the most notable reasons being:
Fast and cheap transactions
Whenever punters deposit money to place bets, they have to go through third-party services, and depending on the service provider it can take quite a while for transactions to go through. This makes last-second bettings hard to execute. Also depending on cryptocurrency, the deposit fees can be almost non-existent. This lack of third-party involvement gave punters more desire to join the industry.
Betting became more efficient
Alongside fast transactions and lower deposit fees, crypto sports betting has become an attractive place because of no limitations. Traditional service providers always have different mechanisms in place, such as Min/Max deposits and withdrawals, verification processes, and many more. Cryptocurrencies remove these limitations and make the betting experience freer for punters.
Lack of oversight
Gambling is not something that is looked up to. Because of that, you can get in some trouble even if you are not breaking any laws. Whenever you are depositing money to make a bet, banks and payment service providers see this activity and some banks blacklist some users from some of their offers if users are making significant deposits to gambling websites. But since cryptocurrencies are decentralized, banks and other third-party services are not able to monitor your activity and everything you do in the crypto sports betting space remains private.
Growth of esports
One more factor that needs to be mentioned is the unreal growth of the esports scene. In 2021 almost 500 million will have watched at least one esports game. Demographics show that most of these viewers are of legal age to gamble. This caused many different crypto sports bookmakers to sponsor different esports events, as people involved with esports are more familiar with cryptocurrencies and easier to attract.
What next for crypto sports betting
Right now most big and well-established bookmakers who have been on the market for a long time don’t accept cryptocurrencies as a means of payment and placing bets. The reason behind this is that they already have a big number of users. But as the crypto, sports betting industry grows the demand for the availability of crypto betting is inevitable to grow as well. This will cause most big sportsbooks to adapt to new changes, and because of this expect to see more and more websites adopting cryptocurrency as one of the website currencies.
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