Rossen Yordanov: Azuro’s Role in the Future of Prediction Markets

Speaker 0: You're now plugged in to the Delphi podcast. Hello, everyone, and thank you for joining us today on the Delphi podcast. Today, we have Rosun Yardenov, who's the core who's the core contributor to Azure protocol. Thank you for joining.

Speaker 1: Hi, Anne. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 0: So, I guess, to kick things off, would be great to just do a quick intro on on yourself and Azure, and then we can, dig into the landscape and and everything else.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. So, I I've been into crypto, I guess, personally since, 2017, 20 yeah. 2017, 2018. And professionally, I, like, I spent most of my career in a in in online payments in a big multinational company that was in the so called high risk vertical.

So it serviced like the betting gambling industry, adult with payments, so basically industries where card transactions mostly fail. And, you have, like, these payment providers and wallet providers to to essentially service the industries. And, yeah, during my time there also, like, we introduced crypto trading, in the applications that we had, actually something that I worked on initially. And I I I had it happen before it was actually trendy. And then then, you know, my crypto was all around, like and then PayPal added it, etcetera, etcetera.

So something I'm proud of. And, and, yeah, in 2020, we started, yeah, we started Azure in 2021, and we've been building it for for 3 years. We call it the predictions layer. And I guess, we yeah. We're gonna speak a little bit about, what it what it means, now with you.

Speaker 0: Yeah. Absolutely. And and to kind of preface going, deeper into Azure, I would love to hear your thoughts around what the trajectory of prediction markets have been has been in crypto and kind of, you know, why it hasn't per se taken off despite there being broader consensus around something like this needing to exist and and why perhaps that's gonna be different now going forward?

Speaker 1: Yeah. Sure. So I guess, like, I mean, what you're alluding to is the backdrop, like, I mean, prediction markets were one of, I think, 3 primitives that Vitalik kind of put in the or Vitalik and the guys put in the Ethereum white paper back in the day. And and, Algor, like, prediction markets protocol, was the first ICO on Ethereum and so forth and so forth. So I I think why it hasn't really become super big until now is is maybe 2 things.

1, first, the the tech stack like in the early years and and and just the overall experience was was very, very clunky. More on the side of, I guess, speed, like, overall user experience, transaction cost, wallet experience, everything else, like, also tooling, I guess, and, congestion, all of these things, like, just overall, like, I guess, like, it was very early. And then, like, as a macro factor. But beyond that, I believe, the other main reason is prediction markets as a concept, initially, I think was was was a peer to peer, you know, like markets concept, where essentially you have 2 pa