We had the pleasure of sitting down to talk with Bethereum CEO, Giacomo Tognoni, about his company’s upcoming ICO.
Bethereum is a decentralized social betting platform that allows individuals the opportunity to bet friends or colleagues using smart contracts. Users are able to customize their own bets using Bether tokens and the results aren’t able to be manipulated. Instead of verbally betting on a sports game with friends and having to track payouts manually, you can do it with ease on the Bethereum platform where it facilitates the winner and payment for you. Here’s what Tognoni had to say about his project.
Giacomo, as the CEO of Bethereum, what is your background?
I have over 20 years’ international experience, primarily in executive positions in Telco, IT, and gaming. In my latest corporate position, I was a board member for a Telco operator. In the past three years, I gained experience in startups by founding and leading a mobile gaming company. With Bethereum, one of the founders knew me and he initially asked me to help as a strategy advisor. After a couple of months spent on the project and advising the team, I became so convinced that it would be a success that I accepted the founders’ offer to join Bethereum as CEO.
You can see my full profile on Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/giacomotognoni/[1]
Where did this idea originate from?
The idea originated over one year ago. The founders are passionate football fans and occasionally placed some bets online or with local betting agencies. From their own experience, they were not convinced that conventional betting offered the intuitiveness, security, and user-friendliness that casual bettors deserved. So they involved a development team and started to design their own application. Soon, they realized that blockchain technology and especially Smart Contracts offered the perfect technology to complement their idea, and Bethereum was born.
Why use the blockchain and smart contracts?
Conventional betting is plagued by a number of industry challenges (covered in detail in our whitepaper: see pages 8-9) – part of them are due to the centralized nature and lack of transparency of conventional operators. Blockchain and Smart Contracts enable us to offer a fully decentralized betting platform, essentially cutting out the middleman (the booker). In addition to generating cost savings vs. traditional centralized solutions, the BASIC advantages are as follows:
- A (secure) decentralized solution is virtually immune from internal or external manipulation
- Blockchain technology enables maximum transparency: all transactions are recorded on the blockchain
- Smart Contracts protect funds and bets and automatically distribute winnings, in accordance with pre-determined rules. This eliminates the risk of manipulation or human error
But we didn’t limit ourselves to harness technology to create a safe, transparent betting platform. We added a number of innovative features, some of which borrowed from the mobile gaming and social media sectors, to offer a truly rewarding and satisfactory customer experience.
