SX #77 - 2024 Q4 Review
SX sets new record in betting volume in 2024 and finishes the year strong
1) Quick Summary 🗞️
Betting volume of $60.6 in Q4 vs. $35.1 in Q4 2023 (+73%)
Total bettors of 1,607 in Q4 vs. 1,379 in Q4 2023 (+17%)
Completed launch of Cashout feature, Glide bridge, and API improvements
Dev focus in Q1: launch of the SX Casino, order book upgrade, & player props
Biz focus in Q1: new cross-chain launches and liquidity integrations of SX token
2) Key Metrics 📊
Sports betting is seasonal, so it's best to compare quarters YoY to truly suss out underlying trends. The charts below show SX’s stats in Q4 (October-December) since our initial launch in 2019:
The chart above shows SX's total betting volume in Q4, from 2019 to 2024. As we can see, betting volume in Q4 hit a peak in 2021 of $44m, before consolidating in 2022 and 2023 at $35m, before increasing 73% YoY to a new high of $60.6m in Q4 of 2024.
SX Bet Mining Incentives ($)
This is contrasted by a consistently decreasing trend of SX bet mining incentives spent in Q4, shown in the chart above. Total bet mining incentives have now been entirely eliminated; this past quarter was the first Q4 with zero bet mining incentives since token launch in 2021.
SX Token Vesting
Finally, SX token is now just a week and half away from being 100% fully vested. As a reminder, SX token launched in January 2021 with a 4-year monthly linear vesting contract for team members, backers, advisors, and the community fund. The final vesting month is on February 1st, 2025, which is now less than 2 weeks away. At that point, SX token will be 100% vested and no new supply will be unlocked.
3) Achievements ✅
SX had a busy fall on both the technical and business side:
Technical
Cashout Launches on SX Bet: SX Bet launched the Cashout feature in Q4. Cashout enables bettors to “sell” bets before market settlement, enabling instant redeployment of funds, better capital efficiency, and instant liquidity. This feature has been a long-time coming, and SX Bet launched the first-ever “no-fee” cashout feature in the world.
Glide Bridge Launches on SXR: Glide bridge launched on SXR, enabling fast, seamless, gas-less bridging of USDC from any EVM chain. Glide lets users pay for transactions with tokens they already have on any chain. This eliminates the need to swap, bridge, or hold specific tokens to pay for transactions. Glide supports all EVM-compatible chains and hundreds of tokens, and lets users transact with the most popular smart contracts.
API Stability Upgrades: We’ve also made huge changes to our API and market structure to improve stability. This has included major upgrading of reporting queues and achieving 50% faster new/fill order calls. Improving the stability of our API and adding new features (such as our “heartbeat service”) has enabled new market-makers to join the exchange, improving liquidity and trading activity on SX.
Business
Highest Volume Year Ever: The year of 2024 ended with a bang, clocking in a new record high in total betting volume with a few days to spare. This is despite the elimination of all betting incentives and relatively heavy cuts in total promo spend in 2024. SX Bet is now growing organically, owing to it’s strong value prop in providing bettors with the best odds in the world.
Highest # of Bets in a Week: The final week of 2024 (December 30th), also saw a new record in total number of individual bets in a week, with the total topping nearly hitting 20,000 for the first time ever. This was tweeted about by our founder in the new year: https://x.com/AndrewY_SX/status/1876058320899092577
SX Rollup Hits $20m in TVL: SX Bet completed it’s migration to the SX Rollup in August. SX Rollup is a native Arbitrum Orbit L2 rollup. It offers a number of huge advantages for SX over its old Polygon Edge infrastructure: 8x faster block times, much more secure bridging, and easier on-boarding flow. SX Rollup hit $20m in total TVL in November, before falling modestly to ~$17m. This officially makes SXR a top 5 Arbitrum Orbit L2 by TVL.
4) Final Word
This quarterly report is a bit shorter than the previous reports as there will be some follow-up roadmaps as well as a rash of announcements being published in the following weeks. There are a lot of exciting developments coming down the pipeline in the SX ecosystem.
Let us know if this format of quarterly reporting is beneficial and we’ll keep it up to help fill in the missing details. We appreciate the ongoing support and feedback from our community and backers. As always, we encourage you to stay engaged through our real-time dashboard, weekly newsletter, and community channels. Together, we will continue to build a stronger and more innovative SX ecosystem.
(Any views expressed in the above are the personal views of the author and should not form the basis for making investment decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation or advice to engage in investment transactions. SX Bet is not available in the United States or other prohibited jurisdictions.)