Last month BetDEX Labs launched its BetDEX Exchange sports betting offering which is tailored for bettors looking to wager with no restrictions. It initially launched last year as a beta version and offers odds across markets such as football, baseball, basketball and cricket.

The CEO and Co-Founder of BetDEX Labs, Varun Sudhakar, joins Viktor Kayed, Senior Business Journalist at SBC News, on the latest episode of iGaming Daily, supported by Optimove to discuss the launch.  

After describing how the BetDEX Exchange functions, Varun talks about why he, alongside Nigel Eccles and Stuart Tonner, started BetDEX Labs to try to address some of the problems the trio had noticed while working at FanDuel.

He said: “So even though [sports betting] is such a big massive popular market, the liquidity is fragmented. So what do I mean by this? Let’s say you go and you bet, you try to go and buy a share of Apple, whether you use either Revolut or eToro or Robinhood or Bank of America, the price of Apple is gonna be the same to the consumer, right? Like with very few exceptions.

“If you go and you go and you go and try to place a bet on the Mavs game, the price that you get for the Mavs could be quite different depending on the book you’re using. And so that’s the key problem that we wanted to solve.”

He also cites high fees and difficulty in withdrawing money for customers as other problems that BetDEX are trying to address.

The BetDEX exchange is a crypto sports betting exchange and Varun and Viktor move on to talk about how the collapse of FTX impacted BetDEX Labs.

Varun describes the impact as minimal given that all trades on the exchange occur in USD coin which is a stable coin pegged to the US dollar. 

Regulation around the use of crypto for wagering is still relatively new and Varun explains the differences in attitude to crypto in different markets.

He says that more countries and jurisdictions are becoming more open to crypto, especially in regions like Asia, however, regulations in the US continue to be “quite nonsensical in nature” and are pushing entrepreneurs out of the US to focus on international markets.

Some of BetDEX Labs’ biggest product launches have coincided with major sporting events and towards the end of the episode Viktor asks Varun why this tends to be the case

“Being a startup in a company going up against incumbents with millions of dollars in their advertising budget, we will try to take advantage wherever we can,” he explained. “One way in terms of putting yourself on the map, getting noticed and having your other individuals and users, potential users know who you are, is doing things around major sporting events.

“I don’t wanna call it free PR, but it’s an accelerant if you will. And it helps to get our name out there. So we do intentionally choose to do major as some call it like some major announcements around major sporting events, just to help and try to get our name out there and increase our brand awareness.”

The show ends with a look ahead to the future and Varun predicts that 2024 will be a “growth year” for BetDEX Labs and will be about  “telling people about who we are, what the unique benefits that we offer are and increasing our brand awareness”.