SX Rollup

Transitioning SX Network from Polygon Edge to an Arbitrum Orbit Rollup

SX Network remains the largest onchain sports betting project in the world by betting volume. SX surpassed $480m in total bets since inception, a multiple of all other onchain sports betting projects, combined.

SX now also routinely offers the best odds in the world for many sports pre-game, beating much more established traditional bookmakers and exchanges. SX Network also remains the first and only sports betting-focused blockchain that is operational today.

SX’s cross-chain deployment on Arbitrum has been a success, with over a third of daily volume running through it. This volume should continue to increase with SX’s recent announcement of a 498,000 $ARB grant from the Arbitrum LTIPP program, which will be spent on betting incentives, tournaments, and liquidity mining.

Current Challenges

However, there are a number of issues with SX as of today, many of which stem as a function of SX Network relying on Polygon Edge SDK for the chain’s core infrastructure:

• 🦯 Outdated infrastructure: it’s become clear over the last few months that the SX Network blockchain needs to move off of the Polygon Edge SDK. The Polygon team has sunsetted their support for the Edge SDK, creating even more additional difficulties.

• ❌ Limited Cross-Chain Functionality: SX Network block times are currently 2 seconds, which is far too slow to do cross-chain live betting. In order to make cross-chain experience comparable to the SX-native experience, it’s critical that live betting is possible.

• 🌉 SX Network bridge dependency: SX Network relies on third-party bridges (ie Celer) to function, which hurts adoption due to the lower perceived security and high-cost nature of Celer.

• 📖 SX validator complexity: SX Network validators are unique in that they currently have dual functionality: they are in charge of both block validation and distributed data reporting. This is a very complex setup that increases cost and raises barriers for users to become validators.

• 💸 Weak tokenomics: SX recently cut commission rates to 0%, which has enabled SX to achieve its vision of offering the best pre-game odds in the world for NBA, NHL, and MLB. However, this means SX is entirely dependent on an inflationary model to reward stakers. While this is the current industry standard in crypto, it nevertheless needs to be addressed long-term for the platform to both survive and scale.

Addressing these underlying weaknesses has been a core concern of the SX Network team. We’re excited to share the first step in our plan to do so.

Introducing the SX Rollup

Recent scaling issues have made it clear that SX needs to upgrade its infrastructure away from Polygon Edge. After many weeks of research, it became abundantly clear SX Chain should become an Arbitrum Orbit rollup.

Migrating SX to its own Arbitrum Orbit rollup offers a number of huge advantages for SX over Polygon Edge:

• 🚅 8x Faster Block Times: Arbitrum Orbit offers 250ms block times, which is 8x faster than the 2-second block times on SX Network. This massive difference in speed means SX can bring its liquidity onchain as well as offer much better cross-chain betting experience. In particular, cross-chain in-play betting becomes possible with this level of speed. Other games of chance, such as onchain casino games, also become possible. Finally, it also has the additional benefit of improved UX for bettors, lower failure rates, and faster bet settlement.

• 🔐 Better Bridging: Layer-two rollups offer the most secure bridging experience in all of crypto as they leverage the underlying security of the chain that they are built-on. This will increase trust in SX Network as the chain will now be relying on Ethereum and Arbitrum for its underlying security, rather than a third-party bridge such as Celer.

• 💰 Revenue Source for SX: Arbitrum Orbit rollups earn sequencer revenue from all the transactions that occur on the chain. For chains with lots of activity, this can become quite a large figure. This offers a tangible, alternative revenue stream for the SX token, beyond charging a standard commission rate. The faster infrastructure also enables alternative revenue streams, like the aforementioned onchain casino.

• ☎️ Best In-Class Support: Arbitrum is the leading layer-two blockchain in the world by TVL and users. Building on Arbitrum Orbit enables SX to automatically benefit from the infrastructure upgrades of Arbitrum, while being able to rely on their team for maintenance and support. Additionally, tighter integration with the Arbitrum enables SX to benefit from the tailwinds in growth in their underlying ecosystem.
  

• ✅ Simplifying Staking: Finally, running a rollup removes the need for SX Network stakers to create their own block validation infrastructure, and instead enables them to focus purely on the distributed reporting infrastructure that is unique to SX Network. This should lower the barriers to entry for new validators to onboard into the ecosystem, increasing the validator set, and decreasing the cost of becoming a validator.
  

Moving Forward

We are still a number of weeks away from this migration, although we expect to get everything done well before the end of the summer. The SX Rollup will be launching with a gasless bridge to enable seamless bridging between the old SX Network chain and the new SX Rollup; users should expect the entire migration to take less than 5 minutes.

Many more details on the design of the rollup and tutorials will be released in the lead-up to this launch outlining the exact migration steps for both bettors, market-makers, and validators. We expect the entire process to be relatively seamless with virtually no downtime on the product

We hope everyone in the community is as excited as we are about this move. As mentioned earlier, this improved infrastructure enables a range of new features and products to be built, which will also be announced in the coming weeks.

About SX

SX Bet is the #1 blockchain sports betting platform by betting volume across all chains. All bets are peer-to-peer and settled on-chain. SX lets you get the best odds when you bet on sports with crypto, all from the security of your own wallet. SX has processed $480m in betting volume. SX Bet is not available in the United States or other prohibited jurisdictions.

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