Over the last few months, no major online sports betting site has been embracing cryptocurrency like BetOnline Sportsbook.
The site now supports 17 different crypto coins for deposits (albeit a few haven’t been added to the BetOnline payouts menu just yet), and it probably won’t stop there.
In the last couple of months, BetOnline has expanded its crypto options by half a dozen coins, and there are surely many more in the pipeline.
The newest crypto coin available for use at BetOnline (along with sister site SportsBetting AG) is Polygon. While we’ve gotten into some of the asset’s technicalities on our Polygon sports betting page, the long and the short of it is this (via Coinbase):
Polygon is a “layer two” or “sidechain” scaling solution that runs alongside the Ethereum blockchain — allowing for speedy transactions and low fees. MATIC is the network’s native cryptocurrency, which is used for fees, staking, and more.
As far as crypto solutions go, Polygon is fairly high level. In other words, the ins and outs aren’t particularly easy to grasp for the layman. Or, as the case may be, the lazy man (yo!).
Fortunately, for our purposes – and for the purposes of most online sports bettors and crypto users – Polygon is effectively the same as other popular coins like Cardano, Solana, Avalanche, etc.
Polygon allows for staking, which means you can earn free MATIC coins and generate some meaningful passive income on top of your winning sports bets, and the network allows for much faster transaction times and lower transaction fees than popular cryptos like Bitcoin and Ethereum.
If you’re looking to top up your account with crypto but need to bet in the next hour or two, Polygon is a good solution.
That said, Polygon might not be a better solution than some of its Proof-of-Stake (PoS) rivals.
For example, if we had to convince you to use Polygon MATIC coins for sports betting rather than Solana SOL coins or Cardano ADA coins, we probably couldn’t do it. They all work the same way and have generally the same benefits when used as online sports betting banking methods.
So the real reason to use Polygon for online sports betting is, frankly, the same reason you’d use any other specific cryptocurrency for online sports betting: investment potential.
So, how does Polygon stack up to other popular betting-friendly PoS coins in terms of recent growth? Below, we’ve quickly broken down how each coin has performed year over year, per CoinMarketCap. (Note: We’re not going from January 1 due to the giant crypto slump we’re annoyingly right in the middle of.)
- Polygon MATIC – $0.36 > $1.44; 300% increase
- Solana SOL – $32.51 > $108.00; 232.2% increase
- Avalanche AVAX – $25.90 > $79.17, 205.68% increase
- Cardano ADA – $1.21 > $0.96; 20.7% decrease
From 2021 to 2022, Polygon has enjoyed the most growth out of the four coins we’ve compared.
While this isn’t necessarily a meaningful metric in terms of indicating future growth (as crypto values are famously volatile), it’s at the very least a sign that the hype is sustained and real.
Of course, you might want to consider going the other way entirely when choosing a betting or investing crypto.
Above, you can see that Cardano is down big Y2Y, and that it’s the only sports betting PoS crypto that’s depreciated in value over the last 365 days.
But the ADA all-time high is $3.09, and popular cryptos historically tend to surpass their all-time highs eventually. It might be a very good time to get invested in ADA, even as other coins seem to be doing better in the moment.
That’d be our strategy, anyway.
Hey, betting’s a gamble, right?
[Check out Peter Chung’s classic series Reign: The Conqueror/Alexander Senki if you’d like to learn more about the Platohedron in the lead image. It’s weird, but it’s way better than all the trash on TV these days. -Ed.]
