It's a great question and one that gets to the heart of how we're different from traditional sportsbooks. Our revenue model is actually quite simple. We make money in two ways.
First, we act as a market maker on our own platform. That means in addition to letting users trade directly against each other, we're also providing liquidity and acting as a participant in the market. This helps keep markets active even when user liquidity is low and solves the “cold start problem” from day one.
In other words, if you want to participate in a niche market where there isn’t any counterparty, we will serve as the counterparty. In the most liquid markets — like NFL moneyline markets — we expect the vast majority of trades to be directly peer-to-peer where we don’t take a cut, but in less liquid markets, we expect most trades will be against Novig, where we will have 1-4% spreads.
Second, for our highest volume users - think professionals and hedge funds - we have a fee structure. But for the vast majority of users, we're not taking a cut at all. When two users play against each other, we're not touching the winnings. That means if you put up 100 Novig Cash and your buddy puts up 150 Novig Cash, the winner gets 250 Novig Cash, whereas on virtually any other platform the house would take 8-10% of the winnings, so you’d only get 230.
This is a complete paradigm shift in the industry. We're the only platform in the world that doesn't take a cut from most of our users' winnings. It's a game changer, and it's at the core of our mission to build the fairest, most transparent platform possible.