Legal Considerations

The legal environment surrounding sports betting is a sea of red tape that is layered differently everywhere you look. This section will barely scratch the surface of the legal considerations involved with launching a project such as ours. Legal counsel is high on our list of funding areas. All that said, let’s examine a very limited chunk of the relevant legal landscape for OpenBook.

Europe is the biggest gambling market and accounts for over 53% of the global market share (EGBA 2021). Gambling is legal and regulated in most of Europe. Regulated gambling is so embedded in European culture that it sponsors some soccer teams. Using an offshore sports book is not illegal in most of Europe, so most offshore sports books bypass regulations and continue to operate in Europe through mechanisms like cryptocurrencies (Arland 2021).

Decentralized sportsbooks run in a legal grey area in Europe. The current largest marketplace in the Web3 space, Augur, has registered itself as a nonprofit research group in the UK. This loophole has been used to avoid regulation.

By proportion, the USA is a smaller market than Europe and Asia. However, it is very rich and rapidly growing with recent regulatory changes. Yet, it is also the strictest and the most powerful in its regulations currently. Most offshore bookies do not serve Americans since the USA is known for taking legal actions against those who serve without a proper license. Online sportsbooks are only legal in select states. On top of that, in-person and online/mobile sports betting are regulated differently. The states allowing online betting still require an in-state office and registration.

OpenBook has two options to start out. On one hand, we could partner with a preexisting sports book and use their legal infrastructure and tested odds to start operation inside the markets said preexisting sports book has legal status in. Alternatively, we could take the Web3 approach and use the loopholes our predecessors are using to serve the Europe and Asia regions.