On the most recent episode of the RHIZOME Report, host William McKenzie chats with Mark Thomas, CEO and Co-Founder of ZenSports.
Mark began the podcast by giving some background on ZenSports and what makes their platform unique.
“ZenSports is a Peer-to-Peer sports betting marketplace where anybody can come in and create and accept sports bets with anyone else in the world without the need for a centralized bookmaker,” he said.
“Our mantra is that we are disintermediating and eliminating the need for a bookmaker. Our whole goal here with our Peer-to-Peer sports betting marketplace is we’re eliminating the need for a bookmaker which thus allows us to charge significantly lower fees than traditional bookmaker charges,” Mark added.
Mark then went on to discuss ZenSports' two token model and the experience he had with getting to work with ICX_Station.
“So, currently just our security and our utility token are built on ICON. We consider ourselves semi-decentralized right now and we will eventually be moving our betting contracts onto ICON, hopefully later this year,” he said.
“The team has been very helpful. Scott Smiley, who runs ICX_Station and Daeki Lee have been very helpful in helping us learn about blockchain because while we were passionate about it, we weren’t really that familiar with it from a technical and implementation standpoint,” Mark added.
William then brought up ICON’s Fee 2.0 and virtual step which allow DApp developers to have the option to pay for transaction fees. Mark chimed in and explained why that is a unique feature and also hinted at the transition of the SPORT security token to ICON’s IRC 16 token standard.
“It’s in the works and it hasn’t been finalized yet but, we’re probably going to a token swap for the security token and put that under the security token requirements that the SEC requires, that ICON now supports,” Mark said.
Mark went on to discuss the nature of the SPORT security token and the underlying utility token (SPORTS) for the ZenSports platform and why he believes that a similar token structure will be a trend amongst future cryptocurrency companies.
“I think you’re going to see more cryptocurrency related companies go with both a separate security token and utility token to clearly delineate the difference between the two and make sure there is no chance of overlap. This will make it clear that there is one for investors and one for customers,” he said.
William then asked Mark to discuss some of ZenSports major accomplishments of 2019.
“I think the launch of our utility token was the biggest achievement because of what it allowed us to start doing. First of all, it created a much more streamline method of getting funds into your ZenSports account than other traditional methods such as fiat or even Bitcoin or Ethereum. Secondly, we were able to create a really awesome loyalty rewards program around the token that not a lot of other betting or gaming products can offer because they don’t have any kind of token,” Mark said.
Mark concluded the podcast by discussing what ZenSports is looking forward to in 2020 and beyond.
“From a business standpoint, growth. We’ve done absolutely no paid marketing up until this point. We’re looking forward to putting the fuel on the fire and really investing a lot of the funds we raised last year into paid marketing to grow. We want to be the largest betting platform in the world,” he said.
