Sports can be a bit more fun when there’s some money on the line. What the decentralized peer-to-peer sports betting application ZenSports seeks to do is give punters a safe, secure and easy-to-use space where the betters themselves have control. Co-founder and CEO Mark Thomas explains, “We are a market place bringing together makers and takers of bets and this gives users a lot more flexibility in the types of bets they can create. They can set their own odds and their own terms so they are not beholden to what a bookmaker says they have to do.”

Cutting out the bookie

An avid sports fan who has enjoyed sports betting for the last two decades, Thomas sees ZenSports – which launched its sports betting marketplace on Sept. 13 – as a way to overcome the dangers and limitations of existing sports betting systems. “There are a lot of issues in placing bets with traditional book makers, be they online or offline, issues including funding your account, trusting that the bookmakers will hold your funds safe, that they’ll pay you out when you win, and the fact that they always set the odds in their favor,” he says. “They also don’t generally offer a wide variety of bets because they don’t have the technology to do so.”

Recalling his own experience with sports betting, he says, “I was worried that if I fund a betting account with some online offshore sports book that they might just run off with the money and do something nefarious with it.”

With ZenSports, there is no centralized bookmaker. It does not create bets, nor does it set odds. Decentralized and peer-to-peer, the service creates a marketplace where users themselves generate bets, giving them total control over the odds and conditions.

The structure of the service allows for limitless flexibility, says Thomas. Users can create bets before, during and towards the end of games and on all sorts of non-traditional subjects. You can create a bet on how many threes LeBron James will nail in a season, or how many he will hit in the last two minutes of a specific game. While you’re watching an NFL game, you could wager that the next play will be a running play to the right, or that the next field goal the kicker kicks will hit the left upright and go in. These are things traditional sports bookmakers cannot do, says Thomas, because they cannot predict the scenarios or come up with appropriate odds. “Well, there’s no better person to know what the odds should be than the person who is creating the bet themselves,” he says. “So by having it be user-generated bets from the betters themselves, the possibilities really are endless.”