Cryptocurrency sports betting depends on the whims of Elon Musk and NASCAR crashes
Cryptocurrency sports betting has risen and fallen along with the price of bitcoin this year, with betting on the NBA, football and tennis rising in the first quarter as blockchain-based money more than doubled against the dollar, according to bookmaker Cloudbet. Dogecoin sports betting sites are the top five for Elon Musk, more on that later in the article.
Cloudbet, primarily an online bookmaker licensed in Montenegro, reports that the rise in the price of cryptocurrencies this year has led to a surge in sports betting, with the total value of betting in December and January up 75% compared to a year earlier (company omit dollar amounts). The bookmaker, which has been in business since 2013, says the rise reflected how betting activity revived during Bitcoin's 2017 rally to a then-record price of $19,000 apiece. Bitcoin opened 2021 at $29,000 apiece and surged to $59,000 in early April. Sports betting volume tracked prices as hodlers felt richer, according to a company spokesperson.
So, as you might expect, the decline in the price of bitcoin from a peak of $63,000 in mid-April to $37,000 at the end of May resulted in a drop in betting volumes, although Cloudbet says that cryptocurrency betting volumes are still at 3 .5 times higher than last year and there is strong growth. action in the NBA playoffs.
Some of the cryptocurrency volatility is due to Tesla billionaire Elon Musk, who has stated at various times this year that Tesla will and will not accept bitcoin. The so-called Elon effect is most pronounced in Dogecoin, a cryptocurrency originally created as a satire on cryptomania. In the past year, Musk has repeatedly mentioned Dogecoin on Twitter. When he tweeted a simple "Father Doge" tweet at the end of April, many thought it boded optimism on the part of the billionaire.
As a result, Cloudbet says that Dogecoin holders are now among its most active customers, accounting for almost a tenth of the players every week (half of the bookmaker's bets remain in bitcoin). In early May, the operator launched a Dogecoin casino. “We did a customer survey a couple of months ago and the most requested coin was Dogecoin,” said Camille Wright, a spokeswoman for Cloudbet.
As invented money without the benefits of traditional economics, such as interest rates and trade flows to measure value against other currencies, cryptocurrencies are often driven by the speculative behavior and emotional whims of traders. Lately, Dogecoin has been falling — after Musk failed to spin the coin on SNL, China cracked down on the cryptocurrency and traders allegedly sold it when a Dogecoin-sponsored NASCAR car crashed in Nashville last Saturday.
On the other hand, the speculative nature of cryptocurrency may be the reason for its use in sports betting.
“There are a lot of similarities between crypto traders and sports bettors, so it’s not surprising that you see more bets when crypto traders have larger balances to play with,” Eilers and Krejczyk gamble,” analyst Chris Grove wrote in an email. “While there may be a positive correlation, it won’t necessarily look the same for every bookmaker, and there are probably a dozen or so other factors that have a bigger impact on betting volumes in the short term.”
And while Cloudbet offers betting in a dozen cryptocurrencies to major bookies, the cryptocurrency remains a curiosity, largely banned from use by regulators, although Wyoming approved crypto gambling in April. There is no reliable data on how much sports gambling takes place in cryptocurrency around the world.