Skill sets gained from working on trading strategies, technology, data science and a personal passion for motorcycle racing made Scott Robinson launch a sports analytics platform. With a bit of blockchain added to the mix, the founder of Apex146 found new ways to proceed in the sports analytics business.
Starting as a passion project, Robinson made an internship program offered to a professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. With the help of students, he developed a framework that looks at athlete performance in Grand Prix motorcycle racing.
Using techniques he acquired working in capital markets and commodity trading at firms McKinsey & Company and Oliver Wyman, Robinson created sports performance analytics that can be applied to motorcycle racing.
According to Robinson, they combined “proprietary statistical methods to accomplish similar outcomes as was done using the ‘Moneyball’ theory in baseball.” After some time, the team expanded and raised capital through a Series A in 2020 and improved its athlete performance indexing capabilities.
Fast forward into the present, Robinson saw blockchain being applied to sports betting and realized the opportunities in penetrating the market through this emerging technology. “There were two blockchain-based sports betting platforms that we thought had a real chance of penetrating the market and more would follow over the next several years,” says Robinson.
Because of this, the team launched a blockchain oracle through Chainlink that lets decentralized applications (DApps) access sports analytics data from Apex146. Through this, developers can create sports prediction markets using analytics data that are linked on-chain and incorporate statistics that would trigger dynamic interactions within DApps.
Apart from this, boarded the nonfungible token train by offering sports collections for entertainment purposes.
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Meanwhile, venture capitals have also recognized the opportunities that lie within the crypto and blockchain industries. A recent KPMG fintech report shows that over $30 billion in investments has flowed into the industry in the past year, showing that blockchain has an important place within the global financial ecosystem.