Sports tipsters, also known as professional handicappers or touts, sell their expert betting picks to hopeful punters, creating a $148.8 billion industry, according to Business Research Insights. But more often than not, and despite such big money involved, the industry is plagued by a lack of transparency for buyers.
AI agent Billy Bets is looking to flip the business model on its head by putting everything on-chain, allowing users to know exactly how much this agentic tipster is winning and losing—and dive into its thought process. The project has already shown enough promise for some notable investors: Billy Bets just closed a $1 million pre-seed funding round with participation from Coinbase Ventures, basketball player Serge Ibaka, and CMS Holdings.
(Disclosure: The CEO and president of Decrypt parent company DASTAN, Loxley Fernandes and Farokh Sarmad, also participated in this funding round.)
Billy currently has its own social media profile, Solana token, and a portfolio worth approximately $48,500, which it is gambling via a number of crypto-based sports books and prediction markets.
Later this week, the Billy Terminal is set to enter open beta allowing users to more easily follow the agent’s picks. And, further down the line, Billy will be able to invest from a user’s self-custody wallet.
The AI agent utilizes a basket of fine-tuned artificial intelligence models. Billy Bets CEO and co-founder Joseph O'Rourke told Decrypt that, among other models, the OpenAI SDK is being used for some parts of research and memory embeddings, a range of Claude models for its reasoning, and Grok for its personality. This agent then carries out “custom deep research” based on a framework established by the team behind Billy, which is being tweaked over time.
In doing this, Billy has already had a few notable wins, such as correctly picking the winning horse for the Kentucky Derby. The agent also made it to the final eight in a March Madness college basketball tournament, and correctly selected the winner of the golf Masters Tournament.
Part of Billy’s edge on traditional tipsters is that the agent can view every bet placed on an event via the transparency of blockchain networks, which rely on public ledgers that anyone can view and verify for themselves.
“Billy can actually watch and synthesize every single bet coming into these specific exchanges. Billy's got a feed that is literally watching every bet come in,” O'Rourke said. “He can see all that data and analyze it in a way that you definitely can't in the traditional sports book. It'd be like having a login to Draft Kings back end, right? Which obviously is not possible.”
This means that the agent can buy and sell parts of a position (or the entire position) as the odds of an outcome fluctuates and the agent sees value elsewhere. That’s, perhaps obviously, not available with traditional sportsbooks that usually only offer the user an option to cash out the full pay slip.
But Billy doesn't win every single bet. While, at the time of writing, Billy has an 82% return on investment on his five golf bets, the agent also has an ROI of -6% on NBA games and -4% on MLB. That’s where it’s placed most of its capital, so Billy’s entire portfolio is down around -3.71%.
For comparison, according to BoydBets, the top-level professional sports handicappers only top out at an ROI of 2.29%.
“Another reason for betting on-chain: there's total transparency,” O'Rourke told Decrypt. “Every single bet we’ve made, win or loss, good or bad, is on-chain. So you know what we’re doing is legit. If we’re winning there’s proof. If we’re losing, there’s proof. That doesn’t exist across the entire pick selling industry—it’s mostly a fraudulent game.”
“People are doctoring records and selling you things that aren't accurate or tracked,” he said. “Our real target audience is anybody who's ever subscribed to a handicapper or bought picks.”
On the Billy Terminal, which is entering open beta later this week, users can view the bot’s win rate overall or focus on specific sports.
Through the trading dashboard, users can view all of the agent’s picks rated on a conviction score. Then, they can chat to Billy about the pick, to understand its reasoning, and will be able to place bets via a number of different on-chain sports books and prediction markets, including Polymarket, Myriad Markets, and Overtime Markets. The team is also looking to add a “one click bet” feature. (Disclosure, again: Myriad is a product of DASTAN, Decrypt’s parent company.)
On the project’s roadmap, holders of the BILLY Solana token, which is currently sitting at a $7.4 million market cap, will be able to gain access to an automated betting bot.
“You would fund your own self-custody wallet but Billy would be able to execute his strategies on your behalf across these sports books on-chain,” O’Rourke explained.
O’Rourke believes that his project is tackling issues that he’s discovered through his decades-long betting career. With sports tipsters, their process is opaque, laborious, and even if things go to plan, he claims, traditional sports books will ban you.
“I'm literally limited at almost every sports book in New Jersey, because they ban winners. And again, this is a problem. That is what actually took me on-chain to begin with,” he told Decrypt. “Billy solves that by allowing you to execute on-chain in these permissionless places.”
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