Divvy builds gambling platform on Solana blockchain

0:01I'm Ashin Edison from BlockQuake Capital for Investment Pitch Media in the Crypto Coin Show. And today on Blockchain Interviews, we have Carlos Liang, the founder of Divi. divi.bet. Carlos, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for taking the time. I really do appreciate it. Oh, thank you Ashin for having me on the show. Excited to be here today talking

0:19about Divi. Likewise. Yeah, I was looking through, you know, Solana protocols and some of the dapps that are coming out and I was looking at some of the more popular ones that people actually like and Divi resonated with me a lot and I really want to learn a little bit more from you and share it with the viewers as well. And I would love if you could just kick

0:39it off by explaining a little bit about Divi and some of the solutions that you're bringing into the cryptocurrency space. Absolutely. Well, first I want to thank you, you know, for definitely having me here, recognizing us, you know, as one of the standout projects in the Solana ecosystem. So, yeah, definitely means a lot to us and we're definitely honored

0:56to be here. But without further ado, I'll go into what Divi is and then and hopefully, you know, educate, you know, the your mass audience on what we're trying to do here. So, without further ado, here we go. So, what Divi is, right? Divi is the next-gen betting platform built on a blockchain that offers guaranteed payouts and instant settlements. And if

1:16that's not enough, Divi also has a DeFi component to it. Now, it enables anyone to be the house. Right? Mhm. Mhm. Okay, interesting. Well, what I've noticed with a lot of the blockchain ecosystems is that some of these ones that, you know, have an aspect of gambling, they really pick up really quickly and they gain a lot of traction. Maybe you can talk about that

1:40convergence between, you know, how much of this is gambling, how much of this is risk management, and how much of this is DeFi. Yeah, absolutely. So, we're actually kind of trying to marry everything, you know, into one, right? And, you know, one of the things that I've noticed, you know, in both the crypto industry and the gambling industry, is that the risk

1:58tolerance there, the risk profile, are awfully similar, right? You know, lately in the last year the word degen has come up and it's really, you know, used to kind of brand everyone within the industry. So, I mean, I think it's pretty natural to kind of, you know, go out to the our, you know, brothers and sisters on the other side of the coin that haven't fully dived into crypto

2:16technology or blockchain technology yet, and offer them a platform where it allows them to do that, right? And I do believe Divi here, we do have the platform here that utilizes blockchain technologies to solve a lot of the pinpoints that are currently plaguing the gaming industry. And when you add the DeFi component to it, I mean, in my opinion, it's game

2:33over. It's something totally revolutionary and it's going to redefine the way that people bet and use, you know, blockchains. Amazing. And yeah, you know what? I think the odds are probably a lot better in cryptocurrency than they are going to the casino or some traditional gambling. And every time I go to the casino, I'm always like, "Guys, I'm already gambling

2:53with my life in cryptocurrency." I don't need to, like, go to the casino. But Right. Well, the only difference here now though is, you know, if when you walk into the casino, what does everyone doubt, right? The house always wins. So, now for the first time ever, we're providing people an opportunity to actually be the house, right? You know, you don't always have to define the odds

3:12now and take what they, you know, the statisticians or the odds providers give you. Now you can actually, you know, park your funds with Divi and have it grow alongside the house. Yeah, I think that's an incredible point to make. And that's the beauty of these, you know, permissionless decentralized protocols is you can be on whatever side you want and you can also see you

3:33know, what the house is doing there or a little bit more of the numbers. And I know I know that you guys were working in the hackathon with Solana and you did really well. And I'm curious, where is Divi at right now compared to where you guys were back then? Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's Well, I wouldn't say it's a totally different product. We've definitely grown a ton

3:54since that point in time, right? At the hackathon, you know, that's when we found the core team and really started building out what we envisioned the future of gaming would look like. So, since then, you know, we've been successfully been able to build a devnet platform, which is basically you know, a testing platform where people can take fake funds and kind of test out the

4:13platform, right? So, that's been going on pretty well for us. And right now, we're in the final sprint to really complete all the, you know, things that are remaining in order for us to release an MVP. But at the same time, as we've been exploring the space and kind of seeing what's out there, you know, NFTs is something that we can't ignore, right? So, we've been able to find a

4:31unique opportunity to actually add that product down our road map, where now we're creating NFTs where they're more than just a JPEG, right? They have a huge community They're going to have a huge community behind it. And also, you know, we realized a unique opportunity for us to leverage our Dedy ecosystem to bring, you know, NFTs you know, these

4:49benefits and utilities that are not seen in any of the other NFTs. And also, we've also added a lot of innovative, you know, new types of games on our protocol that will be released shortly after mainnet. So, yeah. So, you know, difference I guess summary of the vision between now and then is that, you know, we actually have we're on the way of building a real working product

5:08and our road map is much more fleshed out to now, you know, we're building an entire ecosystem that, you know, we plan to really, take the gambling industry by storm. Definitely. And I think that's really important to have a devnet. And from what I understand, you can go and you can try the games and you're not actually risking anything. It's just

5:28play crypto money, right? Exactly. Yep. Yep. So, you know, we Our entire platform is going to be stablecoin based USDC first. So, on devnet, you know, you'll be able to mint basically fake USDC and then use that and test out test the platform out as much as you want without you know, risking any actual money. Very cool. That's great that's

5:50live now and you were talking about moving towards mainnet release and adding more games. Is there any tentative timeline on what are the next steps for TV leading up to that? Right. So, right now I mean we're we're mainly focused on V1 mainnet, right? To make sure that we want to release, you know, an MVP platform that, you know, unfortunately it won't have all the

6:10bells and whistles that you would normally see, but, you know, at least it would kind of give people an idea of the direction we're heading towards and also let the community be able to kind of come in early, test out the product with us, use the product, and actually provide feedback on which way we should go as well. Right? So, you know, that timeline is about, you know, an 8 to 10

6:28week timeline before we get our mainnet, right? We're going to do very rigorous testing and go through audits as well to make sure that we're bringing, you know, the most secure and fair platform to the public. Definitely. And yeah, speaking of audits and security, I'm guessing, you know, people are contributing to the house fund and then there's money sort of in a in a pot

6:49that's available as the games are played. Exactly. Obviously that's going to be important to like have security and auditing measures in the smart contracts to make sure there's no vulnerabilities, right? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that's the number one thing, right? With everything going on in the blockchain space and D5 overall, right? In order for the system to be

7:07completely trustless, people have to know that, you know, at least the smart contracts are built in a way where it's secure, right? And look, at the end of the day I don't think anyone's going to be able to capture all the loot like all the vulnerabilities just because the technology is so new and whatnot, but we're relying on our auditors to kind of

7:24let us know, you know, all of these are all the known vulnera- bilities and also what they think the future vulnerabilities to be and to make sure that we have all the key things patched so that we can do our best to, you know, secure everyone's funds, right? Because we're all part of this house together, so we got to look out for one another. Definitely, Carlos. And I understand

7:42that with smart contracts, you know, being open source and you can see the code, it's only it's only secure until someone finds some new vulnerability that There's always a chance, but obviously you're doing the best that you can. And maybe the Solana ecosystem will help with that and the security and the integrity of the network. And maybe you can touch on

8:04why you chose Solana and that ecosystem to underlie the foundation of Divvy. Absolutely. So, you know, when I originally came up with the idea for Divvy, you know, I was pretty set on having this you know, some sort of EVM slash, you know, ERC-20 compatible chain. You know, on Ethereum it's just not really doable right now just due to the

8:24cost of transactions and also how you know, the transactions per second, right? So, if we were to do that, you know, based on everything's going on now, people would have to pay hundreds of dollars to really put in you know, put in a wager. So, for a $20 wager, you'd probably have to pay like 100 bucks to do, right? And due to the speed of the blockchain, you know, people that

8:43are advanced users of the blockchain can actually, you know, cancel the transaction or even replace the transaction, right? So, then, you know, if you're trying to run that and then also, you know, a sports book at the same time, that would just never work. And that's when we identified Solana as the, you know, the first chain that we see that scale like that has the

9:01scalability to kind of support an enterprise product like this. And also because it's being built with the Rust and taking a different approach from, you know, Solidity and the way that Ethereum builds smart contracts, you know, the way you do it in Rust is slightly more secure just because of the way it's been approached. And I think you can also see that, you

9:20know, in the markets, right? There just hasn't been as many, you know, DeFi projects that have been hacked or compromised on the Solana ecosystem when you compare that to the Ethereum ecosystem. Definitely. Yeah, no, I think that's safe to say. I haven't seen many on Solana. So, hopefully you're in good hands there. Yeah. Yeah. You did mention there with

9:44the devnet, you know, minting stablecoins, USDC, and working with that. I'm curious if there's other assets like some of the main digital assets that are available like maybe Solana or Bitcoin in the platform. And also, is there a Divi token that's used in the platform as well? Yep. And the answer to that I guess maybe I'll go a little backwards. Yes,

10:06there is going to be a Divi token, but that's going to be more of a governance token slash you know, we're going to create some other benefits like you use within the Divi ecosystem. You know, the more tokens you hold the more benefits you're going to be able to unlock. And we'll be announcing those pretty soon. But in terms of Could you repeat that first

10:25part of the question again? I'm sorry. Yeah, I was I was just curious about other assets to gamble with Oh, yes. Yes. Yes. Mhm. So, you know, I you know, had to kind of you know, fumble with that decision when I first started. And actually, you know, I decided that we're going to so far just stick with stablecoins. Reason being, you know, with other crypto sports that currently

10:45exist, you know, oftentimes you're you know, required to use BTC, Ethereum, or the native asset tokens. But when you kind of think about the overall user experience, it actually makes it quite poor, right? And here's why. So, for example, you know, recently with crypto kind of you know, going into a little bit of a bear market, right? You know, you see BTC go from 60 to around

11:0634, 35K. So, imagine you were on a season-long prop bet, right? Let's say, you know, I want to bet that Pat Mahomes is going to win the MVP next season, right? And if this was denominated in BTC, not only do you have to convert, you know, whatever you want to wager in USD into BTC, but you also have to deal with the volatility, right? So, I wanted to kind of just get rid of

11:27all of that, right? You shouldn't have to worry whether Bitcoin is going to be up or down while you're wagering, right? So, we've done we've taken that all out and that's how we chose to go with stable coins first and the reason why we found with USDC is because it's the most used coin in the used stable coin in the Solana ecosystem. But, we have you know,

11:46we've we've fully have plans and a roadmap to integrate with other stable coins such as USDT, die, and some of the other ones that are native to Solana, as well as branching into you know, other tokens in the future if there is a demand for it. You know, right now we want to bring people a product that you know, that closely resembles what they see on the

12:05web two side. So, you know, with everything denominated in the US so there isn't as big of a hurdle when they're converting over. And then also that at the same time they'll be able to realize all the benefits that the blockchain provides. Mhm. Yeah, that makes sense Carlos and you're already gambling, why gamble twice with exactly so that makes a lot of sense. That's

12:27really cool. And now looking down the road, you know, I know you're really on we're looking forward to the main net launch, but I wanted to hear like the vision in longer term say three to five years from now, where do you want Divvy to be at in the cryptocurrency space and the gambling space? Absolutely. In five years I totally see Divvy as you know, when people talk about betting on

12:50on crypto, it's going to be synonymous with Divvy, right? It's going to be the go to place where for people to wager anything on chain and you know, we're going to go beyond Solana. Solana is really just starting point, right? More of a like a proof of concept that this will work and I think by releasing Devnet it already proven that concept a bit. So, you know, we into the tooling

13:08chain agnostic, right? So, we're exploring to whichever one to go to whether it's near, you know, Avalanche, Polygon, you know, whichever one, but you know, we're definitely going to be chain agnostic. Also, you know, I just mentioned that we're going to be supporting a ton of tokens. So, really there shouldn't be any limitation when it comes to people

13:26wanting to wager on you know the blockchain space and on chain, right? And also in addition to that, right? Our first version is going to be a sports book, but we're getting into you know with this entire thing is going to be a gaming ecosystem. So, not only will we have the sports book to start, right? At the end of the five years, you know, we're going to be supporting daily

13:45fantasy sports. I also similar to your DraftKings and FanDuel's, we'll bring that on chain. Next is also poker, right? We're we're currently partnering with John Racener, who's a top 100 poker player worldwide. And he's going to help us and bring all the expertise he knows in poker to build out, you know, what he envisions and what he envisions poker to look like on

14:03chain. Casino games and then also, you know, innovative games that haven't really been seen before that have a DeFi element to it such as no loss pools, no loss lotteries, and things of that nature. So, yeah, we want to be synonymous with betting on chain within the next five years. Very cool. Looking forward to all of that. And of course, the first steps are

14:27to get to the mainnet launch to exactly and release, start expanding the products. For the viewers that want to test out this devnet and get in the community so that they can get on top of it when this mainnet does launch right away, what is the best way for them to stay in the loop and get involved with Divi? Absolutely. The best way would be to

14:48visit our site at divi.bet, which is right on the screen there. And from there, you'll be able to see all our socials that you can follow. And we don't mean I would definitely invite you to join our Discord. That's where you know most of the community discussions happen and that's where you'll be able to stay most up-to-date with everything going on with

15:05Divi. Awesome. Thank you, Carlos. I will leave the links to the socials and divi.bet in the description box for the viewers. Thank you so much for taking the time to come on. All the best with Divi and let's follow up in the near future. Thank you. Awesome. Thank you so much for having me on, Ashton. This has been an pleasure pleasure for me and yeah, looking

15:24forward to speaking to you in the future as well.