Overtime: The Sportsbook Where Anyone Can Be the House

0:00 Welcome back to the permissionless podcast brought to you by the team at Guardian and we're going deep with DeFi builders. We're seeing what got them initially into DeFi, what keeps them up at night, what are the struggles that they go through as a D5 builder, what got them initially excited about building the protocol that they're working on or contributing to and of course where they see the ultimate vision going.

0:22 And today we had a wonderful conversation with Danijel from Thales and Overtime Markets. Thales originally started off in the derivative space and they were originally working on their own virtual AMM for derivatives and then an interesting pivot where they moved into the prediction market and specifically the sports betting area and they're able to leverage a lot of the same tech interestingly enough.

0:44 So we had an extremely interesting conversation where we dove into first of all how does this work on a technical level and what's the bridge between the derivatives and and how do we really get there and furthermore what does sports betting look like and what kind of advantages do we have in decentralized onchain sports betting versus centralized alternatives which have the lion share of the volume today and so we're going to dive deep into that but of course first my name is Owen and over three three and a half years ago I founded Guardian and we started out on the premise that DeFi would encapsulate trillions and trillions of dollars of TVL and play a crucial role in the world's financial system.

1:22 And so we set out to build the security audit solution that allows people to ship with extreme confidence in that environment with trillions of dollars at risk. We use two competing audit teams and a dedicated fuzzing engineer for advanced invariant battle testing. And today, many projects get an audit and then proceed to get hacked later on down the line.

1:42 The Guardian model aims to put an end to this. And today, we've achieved the standard necessary. We're ready to onboard trillions of TVL into DeFi. And already today, with over $10 billion of assets in smart contracts secured by Guardian, now it's just time for DeFi to catch up. Now, without further ado, let's dive in to this conversation with Danijel from Overtime Markets.

2:12 So yeah, I mean really I think that's to start like I'm interested. How did you originally find your way into into web 3? What was it that that caught your eye? I think everybody's got a different story. So interested to to hear yours. Yeah, it's it's been a while. I think it was like 2017 I I bought my first EAT.

2:35 Just curious about crypto from an investment point of view. and then the more I kind of learned about it you know I I'm I'm from software engineer background so I was also curious about the tech and wanted to contribute with with my knowhow. and just one thing led to another I I got more involved with Synthetix. after the whole ICO craze, I started doing some it was mostly like Discord bots just tapping into web3 somehow.

3:08 Yeah. And yeah, I just got more and more into the whole Ethereum world and you know, did the decentralization values and everything. So yeah, and that's how it all kind of started being more serious and and then in when COVID kicked in 2020, I kind of just decided to go full-time web3. Yeah, co was the impetus for for a lot of folks.

3:30 Before CO we I was working in an office a bit corpal but you know there was a lot of socializing and I kind of appreciated those values but then when co and everyone was doing home office and I was like I might as well do what I love right so yeah dude it's and it's crazy how we never go back it's like I don't I I haven't been into like a normal office workplace or anything like literally since then.

3:54 I don't know what was the transition like for you. Have you been the same like still having gone back to an office? Sometimes I definitely miss going to an office but like you said it's just so difficult and you know now we since I founded Thales in Overtime and just the way we are established right now everyone's working like as a digital nomad half of the time I have no idea where people are physically residing because everyone just travels all the time.

4:18 So just difficult to establish an office. So, I definitely miss that occasionally, but you know, we'll see. So, for now, yeah, just full-time home office like you said. Yeah, dude. Exactly the same. I mean, our team as well is like spaced out literally all over the world. We've got people from, you know, like Colombia to Singapore. so again, no hopes of an office for us either.

4:41 And I don't know, it's weird. It's like it's very hard to like even meet up with people like now that my baseline is like hopping on a call with people in my literal bedroom then to go and like meet up with somebody in person seems like such a drag like I think Brendan like we're going to go meet up with somebody on like after this in in the city and it's like oh dude it's so hard like yeah it's definitely not the norm for sure and also traffic is like much worse now so if I had to drive to work that is True.

5:13 Absolutely. But yeah, I mean always worth it and and cool to actually like get out of the apartment and see people in the real world. So I'll definitely cherish that. But yeah, I mean so getting into into co and then what does the transition look like to you know you know working a little bit closer with Synthetix and then when did you decide to ultimately like split out and start to to build out Thales?

5:36 It was like let me just recall I think early 2021. So like more than 4 years ago. I've been involved with Synthetix in in like a freelance kind of way and just active with the community before that and Synthetix had this thing they rolled out called binary options which kind of were very just very simple for me to understand and just I like them and anyway Synthetix rolled them out and it was fun for a while but ultimately they decided it's just not something they know how to scale or have the resourcing to scale and they offered you know the opportunity to some team or whomever to take it on and I saw an opportunity to maybe you know just start something new assemble a team around it so I made the pitch and just

6:20 Because of my track record with them and and I guess connections we've gotten the chance we've gotten the initial seed from Synthetix and we spun out Thales and yeah it's been incredible four years since then and we are still alive which is a success on its own in in this Thales has launched like on the peak of bull market just it's been bad ever seems but we're still kicking and that's I think you know praiseworthy on its own.

6:46 100% like you guys have experienced the full cycle and yeah I mean really to have any like what DeFi protocols last more than four years it's like not a lot like not many maybe a few percentage like yeah like probably 1% like if if even that so I mean well first of all huge accomplishment on that and also it's interesting to see because Synthetix has evolved a lot over the last four years so has there been any sort of impact on how you guys are building and and your relationship with them.

7:18 What what has that been looking like over the past couple years? Initially, it was very close in terms of Jordan and Kane were the guys who got things running, you know, just managed us early on in a sense or at least helped me do so. We worked very closely together even like technologically speaking some of the smart contracts were inherited.

7:38 We were using SUSD so that tie was very close and most of the Thales tokens went to Synthetix. But, you know, four years will just take their toll on on the on a relationship. I'd say we are still very close. We work together on co-arketing and everything. But just communitywise, I think, you know, the separation has become almost complete.

7:57 So, I'm still very sentimental about Synthetix. I still feel like a Spartan and I like to pay homage to that whenever possible. But yeah, just there's not much really technically speaking that's just a touching point for those two protocols right now. Yeah, I was going to say like I'm pretty sure you guys are almost like technically entirely separated in terms of like the codebase level.

8:18 Yeah, like 100% at this point. Yeah, when I originally stumbled across you guys, I was thinking about like, huh, how does this work with Synthetix V3, but it doesn't. You guys don't use Synthetix V3 or or anything like that. Unfortunately, I think Synthetix V3 did not, you know, go completely as planned and there's not many use cases for it right now.

8:38 So, I know they're already working on a V4. So, maybe that's where we come together in some way. Yeah, the V4 I've heard some some interesting things. I think it's going to be a pretty cool approach and particularly for like what you guys are working on. There might be some opportunities there. But yeah, I mean, Synthetix V3 very modular.

8:56 It like has the capability to do a lot of things and I think yeah, it just wasn't like fully utilized at least yet. Very modular system. And I guess in terms of like technical approach, it's something we'll get into more in a little bit, but you guys have a few different products. Is that right? Like you have a few areas.

9:12 You've got, you know, this options sort of trading. You've got this like sports betting market that's built on top of I think the same sort of AMM architecture and then speed markets as well. So I think all of these things they seem to be related like technically but when you think about bringing these to the market what was like the first sort of like product market fit that you guys were going for it at?

9:35 So we started with binary options which we took on from Synthetix and during Synthetix days the binary options just had like order books kind of trading. We took that and we built this novel AMM around it and I do think it was an awesome product but like we are just sport fan sports fans in general and we just saw this opportunity like binary options it's very similar to betting like maybe we can if we just had oracles around it we could actually take these contracts and just do sports betting and that's when we were communicated with chainlink and and they were actually also eager to tap into such an opportunity so they delivered the first oracle infrastructure for sports betting and we just took those contracts for like binary options.

10:18 We hooked those oracles in and we had our first you know decentralized and properly decentralized like many people will just use decentralized very loosely per say. So this was really a fully decentralized sports book. and just you know the way the market has been last four years it's just shown much greater promise to focus on this you know unique product market fit that decentralized sports betting is.

10:44 So we kind of shifted our focus also from binary options towards sports betting speed markets was just kind of a a unique opportunity when when Pyth oracles were released. We just saw something cool we could do with not a lot of effort and we released it and yeah it's just a standalone product that requires no attention from us and yeah we love it as well but I'd say like 99% of our focus right now is just Overtime.

11:10 Yeah, definitely because I mean some of the biggest companies that are crushing it with like the biggest EBITDA in you know the outside traditional business financial world is like sports betting like DraftKings is a huge juggernaut like I don't even know like do they measure their EBITDA in billions. Yeah. So it's like ridiculous. Yeah. So what a great company to have.

11:32 So I mean what kind of edge do you guys give to the canonical user over like let's say they would be using DraftKings? How do you bring them in and get them to to use Overtime instead? You know the assumption is that they would use DraftKings is already kind of tapping into our our selling point because even in US like I'm not fully across it but I think even in US there are plenty of states that still haven't legalized sports betting.

12:00 So I think not even in US not everyone has access to DraftKings and then from the people that do have access a lot of them like everyone who is not a total I don't want to use any offensive word but like anyone who knows what they're doing will eventually get limited or banned or just sent elsewhere right so that's why DraftKings is so crazily profitable but our nature is not you know the desire to be constantly profitable because what Overtime is it's the middleman between those betting and the liquidity provider.

12:31 So, anyone can beat the house, which is something like maybe you can buy shares of DraftKings if they ever go public, but probably not. But like this is the only opportunity in the world to be for everyone to be the house, right? To own a casino, to own a part of the casino. So, that's a unique selling point for, you know, someone wishing to be the house.

12:52 But for betters, so everyone can access it, right? which is again a lot of the world cannot legally or like within their country bet on sports. Yeah. Or they can do that in a very limited way, in a very controlled way. Basically almost impossible for you to keep winning, right? You can win once. If you win twice, you are either banned or restricted or whatever.

13:13 Being decentralized, we have no way to limit anyone. We have no way to ban anyone. Any So, everyone can use smart contracts. And that's where we kind of, you know, tap in. And there's no KYC, which again, I'm a huge fan of not giving away my data if I don't have to. So, yeah, absolutely. On that note about like users and restrictions, do you feel like the average user on Overtime is like not the regular DeFi crowd and more of like sports fans who are taking advantage of that opportunity.

13:42 It's going in that direction again. Even Overtime is at this point almost three years old, right? And it probably started with just the crypto community that's kind of you know sports curious but like a huge overlap but right now and this is also where our focus is right now ena enabling everyone like using better onramps using account abstractions or just enabling anyone who just wants to give it a try without any web3 knowledge to use over time and I think at this point and that's where I also said like Synthetix and and Thales communities used to be like one used to be like 100% overlap three years ago.

14:21 Right now it's very disjointed because our community is now mostly sports fans, people betting and people who don't do anything else in crypto besides using Overtime and I expect that to shift even more as we go on and and implement better tooling for just you know normal on-ramp. Yeah, that's great. I mean it it sounds like good product market fit you know which is the goal.

14:42 Another question is so you mentioned the users also provide the liquidity on the other end. So, as far as like UX and placing bets, is it liquidity providers that are creating these markets of like here's the games you can bet on or is that something that you like the platform facilitates more? I'd say it's more the platform facilitates it.

14:59 So, and that's where some some other attempts on a decentralized sports book have failed to gain scale to just grow is if you make it too complicated for liquidity providers. If they have to market make on every individual market, if you have if they have to be like tentative every hour of the day, it's just not going to work.

15:19 So we do have to automate a lot of those things. Just implement complex logic. Fortunately, not a lot of just manual things. Just automate with all the data available to us. Yeah. To make it very like userfriendly and approachable because ultimately it becomes like you know sort of like a mass market. consumer can come in and not know anything about DeFi, not even know that they're using it perhaps and partake in in the other side of these of these bets.

15:48 I think that's actually a pretty good differentiator from DraftKings and and all those kind of companies in general is like you can be the other side and you can be the house. And as far as I know, there's like none of these companies offer anything like that. That's a pretty good offering point that I I don't know.

16:02 I didn't really think about that too much before. But in terms of like measuring adoption and measuring like success, what kind of KPIs are you guys paying the most attention to to see like are we headed in the direction that we that we want to? I think it's very simple like the more unique users that's like the first first priority like just grow the unique user base and I think that's very important also for a success of a sports book because if you only have one whale if only one whale is betting then your overall success is binary like either he wins or or he loses.

16:39 And but it's not something really to work with. It's not reliable growth, right? But what you need is like 100 wheels. So they balance each other out. So like the first KPI is definitely just unique user count. And then the second would be volume because you can have one user betting thousands and you can have then 99 users betting couple of bucks and that's very imbalanced.

17:00 Again, you want balanced exposure. So like I'd say then you know tying those two together it would be average volume per user but yeah. No and and as many users as possible. Yeah. And that's an interesting question because with a protocol like this, you definitely could design it in such a way where it's better for the whale actors versus a way in which it's like much better for the smaller like traders, you know, changing like the minimum collateral requirement, changing like, you know, the price impact that scales as you get bigger and stuff like that.

17:32 So, I guess where on that spectrum are you guys aiming to be? Do you want to target some of the the bigger positions or are you trying to have more of a balanced approach? What's like the the approach from the protocol side there? That's where it's very difficult for us to keep constantly balancing the two. Every traditional sports book and even some that claim to be decentralized, they have the ability to ban users.

17:56 And when you have that ability, then you can be very flexible on what you offer. You can promise no margin. You can promise high payouts because you know your user base is just people who will eventually lose it all. But if you don't have such an ability and you have to just cater to every single user out there, you just have to keep this balanced approach where we allow we still have a minimal of like I think it's three bucks right now that you need to bet and that's just also because there's a lot of costs around oracles and resolving markets and it just has to make sense financially for us.

18:31 But we also allow I think and it's always growing the liquidity we allow, right? So we are kind of right now on the same level as Pinnacle which is the best you know sports book in the world in in web two world at least. so if we are allowing similar max bet size limits as Pinnacle which I think is very good.

18:51 So we we are not on par with Vegas probably where you can bet I assume millions on NFL. I haven't been I haven't tried but I assume you can do that. But yeah, I think we we cater to 99.99% of of potential, you know, users. Yeah. And I think also like technically speaking, are there any kind of I don't want to say like necessarily limitations, but things that you just have to like build for to address like for example you're using a Chainlink feed underlying to figure out like what are the relative probabilities of these things in real time and then also like to resolve to whatever the the outcome is.

19:30 Do you have to implement any kind of like a price impact on top of that to account for Chainlink not being in real time or or how does that basically work out technically? That's a very very savvy question and and it shows you really understand the the root of how it all works. Yeah. So un I'm going to say unfortunately but yeah we we do have to add a small margin to just account for for it all because we are the only decentralized sports book that offers live betting with high bets high limits.

20:01 We are the only decentralized sports betting book that that allows same game parlays and it's all built using Chainlink oracles which are awesome but you know there's always some sort of delay. So we just kind of have to to balance between offering those things but maybe having just a little bit and not just because of that also because like that's the thing when you are a non KYC decentralized sports book is you attract mostly the sharp bettors right so you just have to just have a little bit of more margin to just make sure you you can scale right before all the normal users come in and and balance the long-term P&L of liquidity pools Yeah, and of course you want to keep that the ambient liquidity that you have backing because that that

20:47 Ultimately becomes like kind of your moat over the longer term is how much ambient liquidity folks have in the protocol that people can essentially trade with. And also on that point, you guys have like I think at least from what I've seen like a pretty unique approach to this sort of outside world betting market than like let's say like a poly market.

21:08 Let's say like like we actually just got True Markets. I don't know if you've you've heard of them. We just got them to to launch on base. I'm one of the patrons. Oh, excellent. Well, yeah, we just we just worked with them, helped them get them launched on base and it looks like, you know, very successful launch.

21:24 So, awesome to see. But it seems like you guys have a model that I haven't really seen with these like prediction markets which is you have ambient liquidity that is sitting there and taking the other side of of these trades at certain you know buckets of of percentiles. So maybe we can cover like just for the listener like what's the differentiator there and and why did we have to make these decisions to ultimately come to the model that you guys are using.

21:49 Well, you know, you took Polymarket as an example and like there's no doubt Polymarket is doing very well. Like they they don't have a token, but I imagine they would be doing very well if they ever did a launch and like many props to that. But there's a lot of still centralized components that they have there.

22:07 There's a lot of manual market making and you know again huge props for making it all work so smoothly for smoothly for end users. But I imagine it it takes a lot of manpower. it it requires centralized market makers and it's something we just didn't feel we could scale. So we took a different approach of trying to create this omni poolool that's across all the markets like all the sports all the leagues all the potential bets and just have a lot of automated configuration just deciding how much you can bet on NBA game how much you can bet on like I don't know golf just a lot of risk customization but just making sure it all runs autonomy with a lot of Chainlink data being provided so and and I think we did show

22:55 That this is a good approach for us that it's it's scaling the volume is good the the UX is good whereas a little bit of trivia true markets actually started by using contracts that we built like few years back for a product called exotic markets which was designed to be a competitor for poly market but again that's where we kind of failed we we failed at market making we just found this huge challenge in being able to offer competitive odds on every every single event you can think of because unlike sports betting which has billions in liquidity going through those markets in web two so you can always scrape those odds and you can use them those custom markets that are very fun but they don't really have a reference on what the odds should

23:42 Be and anyway we we had Overtime so we decided to focus on Overtime but Millie kind of saw the potential of of those exotic markets and took it on and And that's how true markets became to be. And I I really hope they they manage to solve it, but it's going to be a very difficult challenge to solve in a decentralized manner.

24:03 That was a rant. So I'll just pause there. No, I think the key there is like having a product that is sort of self-managing in that sense. So like removing the overhead of like you said, making sure that we are able to market make for all these different markets and handling all of the the details there for the end user like you said.

24:21 And the dream is that it's all done in a decentralized way, permissionlessly, automatically and enforcably by the blockchain and and by you know different incentives and stuff like this. So I guess today what is the the liquidity provider experience like when I come to come to Overtime how can I provide liquidity and with what like kind of configurations can I make?

24:42 It's just a click of a button. So it's just deciding how much you want to seed potentially deciding we we have different pools for different collaterals because people who are like eat maxes they want to sit on their ET so they can deposit into the Eid pool. we have the stable coin pool and we have our our native token pool THALES or what will soon be over as we are migrating and rebranding from from Thales to Overtime.

25:12 And recently we also released Bitcoin based pools for people who are sitting on wrapped bitcoin or coinbased vers version of ERC20 bitcoin. So yeah just allowing people the opportunity to choose between collaterals but other than that just deciding how much you want to deposit and clicking the button and then eventually you you can decide whether you want to withdraw which is again totally permissionless.

25:36 So it's just a click of a button. Excellent. So UX totally just abstracted away to like here's how much I want to put in. I can click a button and be allocated to you know this underlying asset and then in terms of like users making a decision from the stance of what is the yield versus like what is the risk?

25:53 What is the yield coming from? Is it coming from the traders and fees and then what is kind of the risk of providing liquidity? It's exactly like what you said you are underwriting all the user bets. If users are winning, you are bound to to lose some money at least in the short term. If they are losing, then you can just walk away with yield at any given, you know, time of day.

26:16 Yeah. And of course, as we've seen from, you know, a lot of these decentralized trading venues in general, like, you know, Synthetix per, GMX pers, Hyperliquid per you know, now these prediction markets as well, like users tend to they tend to lose over time. if you look at like the GMX charts like traders are in a net loss of like tens of millions over over years.

26:39 So it's something that tends to work out for for LPS. But I guess on that note, have you guys explored anything with like allowing traders to use leverage? Is that already something that you guys support? What sort of thinking have you guys put in there? So you know the question would be what's leverage in sports betting because you are kind of already leveraged out of the box like if you bet on the underdog you get 10x maybe winnings so you are kind of already implicitly leveraged but there is a protocol out there I haven't tried it myself it's called lever I think with a four in the name and I think they allow for live betting leverage and I think it's very awesome idea I haven't seen it work I know some people that tried

27:24 And I've heard it's very easy to get liquidated, but maybe that's just leverage trading for you. But basically, you would bet in play, let's say an NBA game, you would make a bet on on a team winning, I don't know, Lakers, and then you would put the margin and depending on how those odds move, basically, you are trading with with leverage.

27:43 So, I think it's very cool. So, you know, maybe you guys can give it a shower, whoever is interested. I'm not endorsing because I haven't tried it myself, but yeah, it's a cool idea and I have thought about it myself. I just find it very very difficult to solve again with the you know implicit blockchain latency that just has to exist and then adding leverage to to that I just find it very difficult right so unless you make it very easy to liquidate users you're probably going to lose money but you know maybe they solve it so good luck to them definitely yeah and I can imagine like with these very binomial outcomes of like zero or one like either where Mike Tyson knocks out Jake Paul or Logan Paul or Mike Tyson gets knocked

28:27 Out by by Jake Paul. There could be big swings in there like so I mean leverage is probably maybe not even what you want to be using. Not just the the swings like the swings are kind of okayish organic but like the front running right someone sitting you know next to the ring seeing the momentum. I mean that game was rigged that that fight that bout was rigged but like just talking in general someone sitting courtside seeing the momentum seeing the sequence of hits you know being being just delivered like they can make a bet quickly and until that information gets to the blockchain like there's a huge window of of you know maybe it's 20 seconds maybe it's less but it's still a window right so and unlike normal and that window exists like

29:10 Latency is something you cannot escape but if you're a traditional sports book you're just going going to go back and you're going to deny those people from claiming their winnings, right? If you're a decentralized sports book, maybe you can do that, but you shouldn't be doing that. You're basically killing your biggest selling point, right? So, yeah, 100%.

29:26 What are some of the the markets available to users right now? What games, what sports can they place bets on? Honestly, like I think almost everything DraftKings offers, you guys use DraftKings. We love Draft DraftKings as well. It's almost everything they offer. We in the last four or five months we partnered with Oddsge Gem which has been a great move for us.

29:48 They they allowed us to scale our offering to add like 20 more sports and leagues to add live betting to add same game parlays to add futures to add system beds. So it's pretty much on par. Probably some I'm going to say smaller. I'm not really implicating the sport is smaller but it's not as liquid like maybe Formula 1 NASCAR like motor sports are still missing golf things like those but yeah we've covered a lot of ground and you know obviously we plan to add everything that makes sense to be added in the following months as well that's awesome was there any particular event like so far that has driven the most volume yeah I mean NFL has always been the biggest volume maker and obviously Super Bowl right and after that it's been NBA

30:34 And just the the biggest ones there are, right? Yeah. And how do you guys push to get more users? Like let's say the Super Bowl is coming up, like do you guys do any ads? Like what's the user acquisition pathway there? Promos as well would be would be interesting. Ads are challenging for a nonregulated sports book. That's true.

30:51 Yeah. Because not many venues would take your ads. You can obviously you can advertise on things like Coin Gecko, Ether Scans like on those crypto venues, but that's not going to again tying back to your question on whether our audience or community is sports bettererss or crypto users. So crypto users, I think we already pretty much tapped into like 100% right now.

31:17 We want to get more and more sport. That's a much bigger market for us. but yeah, we cannot really be running Super Bowl ads like halftime ads. So yeah, but there are things we can do and a lot of things that we've done already. we've built this NFT contract that's basically allowing like it's the concept of free bet, you know, like you get free bet or bet credit.

31:38 So we've built that and now we are about to release full account abstraction where we can just have you guys like I can just give you a code, a voucher. You'll just log in with your Google email or whatever you want to use. you'll get a wallet created and it's and all transactions will be funded. So, you don't have to worry about gas and you'll get a betting credit and basically you're good to go, right?

32:03 And you know that's how we hook you in and hopefully you like the experience and then you deposit real crypto somehow from Coinbase or whatever or like we even have integrated this onramp on ramper tool where you can buy crypto direct with crypto cryptocard but it's kind of limited per country so it might not work everywhere but yeah like that's the idea like making it really simple for people to just log in have their wallet generated for them have full account abstraction and sponsored gas.

32:34 So, it's just basically just like using DraftKings, but probably much simpler because you don't have to do KYC and wait for it, right? So, yeah, 100%. And from all my talks with like a lot of D5 founders, UX is a really big point of like how do we make it easier for users to come on? And I imagine that's even more so for you guys because you're much more like non-crypto like mainstream sports betterers who have never even they don't have like a meta mask or anything like that.

33:03 So yeah, I imagine that is going to be pretty huge for you guys. And do you envision ultimately moving the entire product over to something where it's totally abstracted away and and maybe you're even covering gas for everything or do you want to keep it you know grassroots still interfacing with crypto like we are today? What's your sort of approach there?

33:23 It's more of the former. So we and and I think we are really close to like abstracting it almost all away at least getting in getting out back into like traditional money. That's just something you have to do via a text or whatever. But yeah, like just abstracting all the you don't need MetaMask anymore. You just need to log in using a social login or whatever.

33:48 A smart account is generated for you. All gas fees are sponsored. So basically, you just need to deposit some crypto which you can do in a number of ways. Excellent. And then yeah, I mean, so if if you've got the UX and let's say you've got that completely solved and it's totally seamless, what is like the number one thing that is limiting your guys' growth?

34:09 Like what's keeping you from getting to like $10 billion in in volume per week or, you know, something crazy like that? I think it it all just needs to happen iteratively. So first would be you know just abstracting the UX and then we just iteratively grow the number of users and as we grow the number of users then we'll have better P&L performance which will attract more TDL then we can raise the limits and then you get even more uses users and it's just kind of you know a thing that just one thing grows the other and you know it just keeps yeah going both ways.

34:44 So yeah, billions will take some time, but you know, one step at a time, and I do believe we'll get there. Yeah, the flywheel of more volume attracts more liquidity, big more volume. Yeah. And sort of just up and and up from there. And it seems like you guys have, you know, you've already got off the initial like it's always the hardest thing to start because you've got to attract the liquidity and then you need the volume and you guys are already there.

35:08 So that's like the hardest part in my mind at least done from that side. And then now it's about just like scaling that from both sides which like you said will will basically happen you know over time as you know you continue to pick up steam and hopefully you know retain the liquidity that you have and then bring in more as possible.

35:27 So yeah I mean very bullish on on Overtime's outlook from here and then I guess in terms of like what's the one area that you're trying to improve the most? So obviously UX is a concern. Is there anything outstanding from that that's like you know one thing that you really want to get shipped right now? Like definitely UX there are a lot of small things that just and you can and we can really see it.

35:53 I think over the last year we got a lot of web two users on boarded. You can see them struggling like understanding why a transaction is not being mined. they understand they need to deposit crypto but they deposit USDC and they just cannot wrap their hands around why it's why they need it as well. So, but you know, just putting all that aside, I think the biggest like scaling issue for us right now is just balancing the demand because we we have whale users, but they they only bet like on if Lakers are playing Clippers, all the bets are on Lakers and we really need to find better ways to kind of maybe do some rebalancing of the odds to attract, you know, more volume on the other side.

36:35 So, we're just selling off our risk somehow. So that's definitely something that's just you know constantly in my mind you know seeking a solution for it. Yeah that's pretty interesting. Do you guys have any mechanism or have you considered any mechanism where it's like funding where one side you know like a funding fee to the other? We do have that but it's kind of different from the funding rate in futures or in spot trading which is kind of simple I think because like we are also fetching odds from external sports books like Pinnacle or DraftKings.

37:07 So we can only play around with funding grade inside our margin. So like only one or two or 3%. If we go above the margin, we allow an attack surface where someone can just, you know, go to pinnacle, make huge bets, come back to Overtime, rebalance. So yeah, it's it's a difficult thing to solve. Absolutely. Yeah, it's kind of interesting to think about that.

37:28 Like obviously with you know the per markets trading like actual assets you can go and you can literally change the reference price on like all these sexes and stuff by like if you have enough volume to go that and then I guess yeah I didn't really think about it but the same sort of thing applies if you go to DraftKings and you can kind of like take a delta neutral strategy and then just like maybe change the feed and and also get the funding out of that.

37:54 So that's that's interesting. It's obviously it's not great whenever your protocol gets like arbitrageed in such a weird way, but it's like it's a cool way to see like somebody take advantage of a of an economic system that we always have to like try and guard against. Everything is a lesson. So, I know I have this mostly optimistic view of things.

38:11 You know, even if you get an exploit hopefully not big enough to to ruin you, like it's it's a huge lesson. So yeah, the economic vulnerabilities are some of my favorite in terms of like just thinking about, you know, what kind of positive weight loop can we make in the economic system? And I think this one's really interesting because you're you're tying in markets from outside the crypto world and liquidity that's not even to do with crypto in general.

38:40 So yeah, really interesting stuff to to think about. and a lot more variables like depending on the market type, you know, like player props. If someone knows the player is sick, they already can do whatever with it. So, like a huge surface to cover. Yeah. It's like in normal trading when you try to get like closest to the like the sequencer for trades, you could liken that to like going to the actual boxing match and just sitting side.

39:07 So yeah, very cool how there's like there's definitely parallels in that sense. But I was interested, are there any like one particular feature or set of features that users keep like asking you guys for or like maybe something where you're not like feature complete with DraftKings? is there anything like that that you guys are thinking about putting on your road map?

39:25 We've gotten pretty close like we had live betting. We added that. We had demands for same game parlays. We added that just like a month ago. It's still not on the level of what DraftKings offers. So obviously we need to work there. But to be honest, if you know if you're asking about like a whole feature that's missing, I think you know we are pretty much on par.

39:49 So it's more just like improving existing features to really reach product parity with the likes of DraftKings or you know whatever. That's right, dude. The parlays get like pretty complex. Like I know I've got a few friends who they've been on like UFC fights and stuff like that and they've got like every card every fight on the card like parlayed with each other in like this different way.

40:08 It's like dude I don't even understand how this works anymore. So maybe you know UFC we still don't have live betting for UFC. So maybe that's something that's definitely in the backlog is just you know every sport requires you to be if you want to run a sports book you have to be an expert for every sport and every sport has its nuances.

40:26 So, and the thing with UFC is that officially all games start when the event starts and you don't have really a good idea of when each bout will start individually. It just makes things very difficult for a you know onchain decentralized sports book to just capture the data properly. Yeah, absolutely. And another thing that just popped into my head is like your product, your service is almost being marketed for you by all of the different like sports companies in so far as like when the UFC goes and they get more fans, you are growing your potential like market share through that.

41:02 So I think that's a really interesting way to look at the businesses like as you know the sports world grows, you guys are winning as well, which is like a pretty pretty bullish pitch. But yeah, just something cool about the model of of what you guys are working on. But I mean beyond that, so obviously, yeah, future complete, it's really just about like supporting, you know, some of the other sports like UFC, F1, stuff like this.

41:24 And then, you know, maybe some of the parlay stuff that gets like kind of crazy and like hard to understand like what are people even betting on? People have been asking about being able to do like inplay parlays maybe, but yeah, I don't know even even if DraftKings let you do that. Yeah. And I wonder even if there is like one feature that just puts it over the edge where all of a sudden everybody wants to use the platform and hopefully not in a way where it's like they're just like arbitrageing value from the LP, but like one feature where it like just reaches like a very just a culminating point of having so much product market fit that you guys almost just I mean obviously then it will get very stressful on the on

42:03 The LP side, but yeah, something like that. I don't think there there's a golden bullet as such anymore. I think we've covered all the ground. I think it's just about spreading the word. a lot of people are coming to Overtime you know and we are helping them alone to to get on boarded and it's just word of mouth marketing you know people using Overtime just saying how awesome it has been to them how much they enjoyed not being banned not having to give away their data you know and all the other complexity and being able to just claim their winnings you know as soon as the game ends and just walk away with it.

42:39 So no additional complexity. So word of mouth marketing has been very good to us and you know that can even go exponentially but we're definitely going to invest more into traditional marketing and just capturing more users and I just think you know the quality of the the product and generally crypto momentum and and just spreading crypto usage in the world and I think the new administration is kind of leaning towards that.

43:03 So yeah I think all of that tied together will definitely get us to a much much larger scale. Yeah the headwinds are great at this point. Yeah. And I think also that's a great like selling point is, you know, guarantee on payout. It's like and you're not even trusting anybody to get paid out. So yeah, I think that's a big selling point.

43:21 Makes sense why a lot of those people would be coming over from like a DraftKings, etc. But yeah, I mean beyond that, what is your team looking like these days? Are you having any like troubles like finding the right folks hiring? Are there any scaling efforts there? The team has been pretty stable for the last three or four years.

43:40 It's mostly people kind of that came through reference people we know people even I personally started as a web two developer and and learn my way into web 3 and all and I kind of did the same with a few buddies so got them to to work with me and I think you know if you don't have that if you don't have a network of people who who you can on board to work together I think it's very difficult hiring in in in web3 I get dozens of of messages every day from potential developers and they all say they are experts and I don't know if it's just a scam attempt because it's pretty much always always the same message like I'm an expert in blockchain in NFT like in everything and I'm like

44:26 I I even joke or troll those guys sometimes I I tell them like if you're such an expert why are you unemployed like why are you coming to me right so but yeah and I actually tried like back in the early days Because as I said, we kind of were a crew of people who are not that web3 savvy.

44:44 Like we are very experienced web 2 developers, but we didn't really know a lot of of like solidity back in the days and everything. So I tried hiring some of those experts and it's just it's usually Asian guys and I really not, you know, being having any prejudice. It's just factually how how it's been usually Asian guys.

45:03 And then culturally and time zones. Honestly, I can imagine all those dowists that try to hire people from all over the globe. It's it's difficult honestly. Yeah. And I mean nowadays you have to make sure they're not from like North Korea. And we've seen that, right? We've seen that in a few places. So yeah, I think it helps to just, as I said, have a network of people who you can bring on and work together.

45:27 And that's I was fortunate to have that. Absolutely. Yeah. I think I hope it will get it will get easier and easier as obviously more developers are onboarded and obviously it's like if you wanted to hire somebody with like two years of experience in 2020 that's just not happening but now there are more there are a lot more people around that have like 2 years of experience I think hopefully it will it will start to get easier and easier to start to scale a technical organization in web 3 for that reason but yeah I think you're absolutely right about the network like you had to have it especially you know, four 3 4 years ago and then today even so that that rings true, especially for the folks that are even more senior.

46:08 That's like the hardest roles to hire out for is like how do I get somebody who's got, you know, a ton of seats and they've been doing this for like 4 years. That is still definitely a bottleneck. But hey, I think as as the industry grows and and continues to to live on, I think a lot of these problems will get solved and and become easier.

46:23 But yeah, I mean particularly as you guys are deploying more and more code as you're, you know, shipping more contracts, do you guys run into any kind of I don't want to say like bottlenecks, but like DevX type issues where it's like managing all these different contracts? I know you guys I looked at your deployments, you guys have a ton of contracts.

46:42 What's the experience like there? Is there anything missing from the developer side in terms of like monitoring and introspection on all of your systems? What is that like for you guys? I've been in in crypto a while and I've always been aligned with Ethereum and I always hated all the other chains. So, but you know then like market is is kind of shitty right now but there was a time when I don't know Blast Chain would launch and Monad chain and whatever.

47:08 So, and then everyone thinks you need to be on every of those chains that and the hype lasts like what one or two weeks, right? And you know, we also kind of weren't really that experienced at the time and we would even believe in those attempts that we need to be on every chain and we would go and try to be on every chain like on ZK chain and just it's very difficult to do especially with a product like ours like which kind of you know requires attention to detail like checking liquidity across chains.

47:40 So you know it's difficult being we are currently on three chains three layer two chains and those I understand why we need more L2 chains optimism Arbitrum and Base even though B is part of optimism super chain but it has its own maybe like market feed bitcoin base driving adoption so those three chains I'm I'm happy that we support it's still they're fully compatible but you still have to do things on every chain individually like if you need to change a configuration and we use multisigs to just make sure you know it's all being checked you know peerreview and everything you have to set every transaction individually you have to do every deployment individually and ultimately you have to monitor every chain individually and I know there are projects who are actually working on tooling

48:27 To make all of that easier but yeah I haven't really we haven't really used any of those in production so we still just kind of we've built our own tooling for monitoring we use and and it was really difficult called now with the bybit hack that safe just stopped working right because the culprit was the safe deployment mechanism right through AWS buckets and they just haven't worked for like almost two weeks and then we had to find alternatives and we figured out there are really good alternatives but then again can you trust the alternatives after what happened right so yeah I mean the tooling can be much better yeah you kind of realize like how much you depend on certain parties when one all of a sudden one of them just stops working like I

49:11 Think a lot of the teams that we worked with they had to altogether just like halt shipping for like you know those the period of 2 weeks we did as well but you know safe was like communicating it's going to be 24 hours and then I think they're still not fully functional to what they were before right but anyway we found really good alternatives like then I think the project is named the den or something so it's it's really cool like it's I I I'm going to go as far as saying it's better than the safe front Awesome.

49:39 How do they serve their front end? Is there any like risk on that side? I think it's IPFS. I there's always risk, right? So, but ultimately you also have to just run your simulations through Tenderly. We always do that. Tenderly is an awesome product. Just check. I think it's a good reminder that you just have to always check what you're signing even though it's difficult especially we have like a number of transactions we have to do even daily.

50:06 We keep adding new sports enabling live betting on sports or disabling or so yeah it's difficult to keep that security while trying to iterate quickly right 100% and I even went so far as to make like a script for one of our clients they end up like generating a lot of configs that have to be set and post it through a safe and then it's like well I'm not going to manually check 40 50 different like safe transactions so yeah I mean We we even went ahead and made like a script that just goes through on Selenium, pulls up the different safes across all the different chains, grab all the the details of the data that's listed in the UI, check it against the API service that they have to make sure it's not like

50:51 A UI musking, and then also like simulate them on using like a cast call or something like this. That's been working pretty well for us so far. But yeah, I mean the just the fact that we had to like, you know, build our own sort of like solution for that goes to show there's a lot of different areas that could use some buildout.

51:09 Yeah. And I mean in terms of like what you guys have built internally, what kind of like monitoring do you guys have for your products? Right now we've built some just front ends that that show us all the the relevant data we want to see in one place. Obviously we have Dune as well but I know even Dune is becoming complicated because you need to pay now to get often you know refreshes of the data but so we built our own dashboard with real-time data.

51:35 We want to see like the exposure per liquidity pools and you know current demand and whatnot. we've built discord bots that print every larger bet. I mean they print every bet but we made dedicated channels to to be able to more easily follow the large action right so we are across it I'm not sure if there's more to be honest probably is but so things like that yeah and I guess if there were a product like something that I don't know have you used something like Grafana before yeah I've implemented a few dashboards myself so yeah definitely something to I don't know how it ties together with with web3 I guess you have to build like listeners you know on your own like it would be cool to have some kind of a product

52:18 Where it's kind of like the Grafana of web 3 and you could kind of tie it in and it could also be somewhat a combination of like Sentry and like let's say a user uses your application. The feedback loop that I typically see is like user uses application their transaction reverts for whatever reason they go and they post in the Discord and then like a Discord mod has to ask like oh what did you set the gas to and like stuff like that.

52:43 I just feel like that could be totally improved where you know it could be something like sentry for web two where it's like here's the details of this transaction that failed here's the line that it failed on here's all the parameters at that point and stuff like that we actually even built something so now you reminded me because that's more of a so I'm a backend developer but the front end guys they've built a listener that prints every error from your browser console into a Discord channel and and a user would come in and they say, "I'm getting this issue."

53:16 And we could cross reference that with the log and it really helps us, you know, help users more quickly. But definitely what you said, like if someone would package all of that into one tool or one, you know, suite of tools, yeah, could be a good product. Maybe it's already out there. Who knows? Yeah. I mean, in terms of like a team like yours, how much time would that even like save you guys?

53:37 I'm always skeptical about the initial setup being more expensive than using what we have but you know once maybe that all that is out of the way I don't know a bunch difficult to peg it right so yeah assuming you didn't have to like maintain all that overhead and it actually did like work for your setup I think we are a bit nuance nuanced right because like the sports betting angle just requires a lot of monitoring that I can't really imagine someone being able to nail that with a generic web3 tooling right yeah absolutely Absolutely.

54:07 I think there's definitely a gap in the marketplace. So, it'll be interesting to see, you know, if somebody ends up coming and and building for that, but I think we're pretty much coming up on time. So, I mean, first of all, just want to say like, dude, thank you for hopping on. Is there anything else you want to cover?

54:22 Anything else you want to say? I appreciate you having me. I I don't want to make a huge like pitch, but as I I've kind of touched upon it, we are just rebranding probably in in the next few weeks and and the protocol will be officially tying together with the Overtime sports book. So the protocol will be named Overtime from Thales and it's going to have its own token OVER token.

54:45 So just you know if that's news worth spreading just putting it out there. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, dude. Where can we send them to to follow you guys to use the app? What should we push them to? Our Twitter is or or X. It's still the the main source of of the inter information. other than that, we are very active in Discord, always replying to users like know in a few minutes.

55:09 So, I think those two will be the best for like the social aspect. Other than that, you know, our website for betting obviously. That's perfect, man. All right. So, we'll of course we'll we'll have the X listed down below. You can join the Discord. You can use the app and you can start betting on I mean pretty much any any sports market at any time.

55:30 Guaranteed payout and future parody with DraftKings and and you can use it 24/7 without getting banned. So, that's Overtime. Thanks for hopping on, dude. Yeah, thanks for hopping on. Thank you for having me.