In my mind there is no doubt the future of betting is on the blockchain. Anonymous, transparent, fully verifiable, trustless, without banks or governments interference.
As an investor I’m doing my homework, testing and benchmarking several crypto betting projects, and sure enough one of them is wagerr.com the “private, no limits sports book”. Brainchild of David Mah, it has some intriguing tokenomics and value coupling, but yet some red flags (very few updates in GitHub probably the biggest red flag of them all).
In the benchmarking process I’ve come across with the capital sin for a betting project, wagerr.com doesn’t conform to the events outcome. So, you can bet in a sport event and even if you predicted correctly there is the possibility it doesn’t pay the winnings.
I staked 10000 wgr at 1.25 odds on Islam Makhachev win vs Alexander Volkanovski. It was a successful prediction, as indeed Makhachev won the fight, yet the wagerr network deemed this as an Event Refund ?? You can actually check this in the wagerr blockchain explorer:
https://explorer.wagerr.com/#/bet/event/121018
Other big no no of wagerr.com is the long time it takes to settle a bet, it can be days, weeks or some times simply indefinitely, your bet funds get locked and you neither can’t cash in or use them for other bet.
Here it is an event, UFC 283 where I placed a bet on Gilbert Burns vs Neil Magny and as by this writing (one and half month later the event took place it’s still not settled), still waiting for oracle, so the funds of that bet are locked and can’t access or use them. Again we can confirm this in the blockchain explorer:
https://explorer.wagerr.com/#/bet/event/120014
UPDATE:
this has now actually been payed, curiously 3 days after publishing this post, so an event on the 21 January, was payed after 46 days, with the funds retained on chain all this time.
There are other problems identified with wagerr, but these are horrible and total showstoppers. I have used the traditional support channels, discord server and twitter, to get help about these with no success.
Expect in the following weeks a post with the crypto bet projects wild wild west benchmark and concluding recommendations. But, my simple advise for both bettors and investors is: DON’T TOUCH WAGERR.COM, not even with a 10 meter pole, you will only loose.