Stakefair, a decentralized finance (DeFi) company that allows users to predict the outcome of sports matches and other real-world events to earn money by staking digital currency, has raised $670,000 in pre-seed funding for a full-scale roll-out.
Investors involved in the round include Adaverse, Nestcoin, Kepple Africa Ventures, Canza Finance, Voltron Capital, Echo VC Chain, Timi Aboyeji, Tomiwa Olaosebikan, Peter Kisadha, Saturn Blockchain Ventures, Thrive Africa Syndicate, Nehikhare Igbinijesu, Oluchi Enebeli, and Clement Hugbo.
The funds are being channelled towards building an ecosystem for decentralized and centralized platforms to interact with ease, that is, a DeFi yield generation protocol for users, businesses and governments.
Akinyemi Akindele, founder and chief executive officer, Stakefair, says that Stakefair was just meant to be a predictions website that allows users to stake on events using digital currency but he “was triggered by the stories of ruin and regret of the respondents of the user research,” so he “set out to build a financial model to see if ‘no loss’ sports predictions was achievable.”
Stakefair has been undergoing beta testing as BetDemand since the end of 2021 and has witnessed a wide consumer acceptance. To date, the platform has attracted over 6,000 users from Africa, Europe and North America, and recorded over $800,000 in user stakes.
However, during the testing phase, Stakefair evolved beyond a gaming company.
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“We have built much more than the business-to-consumer (B2C) DeFi gaming products, we have also built the DeFi infrastructure that allows other developers to build DeFi apps like ours for use cases such as no-loss staking, treasury management, yield aggregation, wallets and market-making,” Akindele said.
Like traditional gaming companies, the outcome of the wager can either be a win or a loss. However, Stakefair’s game-changer is its ‘no-loss’ sports staking offering that encourages individuals to see the platform as a yield generator through their crypto stake.
The ‘no-loss’ sports staking model is such that when a user stakes a unit of a coin on a set of games, Stakefair will invest it in DeFi lending pools so that it can yield interest.
If the user’s stake wins, they get their capital and some return on investment (ROI). If not, they get only their original staked amount. There is however a minimum timeframe for which the stake must be locked up to yield a return.
“Due to the popularity of Stakefair during the beta period, we have decided to vertically integrate and build our own DeFi lending and borrowing pool. That way, the lending and borrowing that generates the yield that backs our no-loss pools can happen on our platform,” Akindele said.
