PeerGaming — Cross-operator liquidity in competitive wagering

The constraint

Every peer-to-peer product eventually meets the same ceiling.

Competitive formats — daily fantasy, prediction markets, player-versus-player games — are fragmented across isolated operators. Prize pools are capped by one operator’s player base, and network effects reset at every boundary.

Most players do not dream about doubling their money. They want a small stake and a real shot at something life-changing. That requires more than one opponent, or one operator.

Meaningful upside needs deep pools. Deep pools need more players than any single operator has.

The missing layer

The supplier layer exists. The counterparty layer barely does.

Live casino proved one version. A single provider distributes the same content across hundreds of operators, and each keeps its brand, wallet and customers. But nothing is pooled: every player bets against their own operator’s book, and no money crosses between operators. That solved distribution, not liquidity.

Peer-to-peer needs more than shared content, because the players are each other’s counterparty. Money has to move between operators. Online poker is the one place the industry built that: pooled players across six US states, settling between licensed operators, under an interstate agreement that took a decade and survived a legal challenge.

It never spread. Every other peer-to-peer format still builds its pool alone. Most never reach critical mass, and the rest hit the limits of their own player base. The missing layer is liquidity no operator owns.

A conceptual illustration of market structure, not a product.

The question is not whether operators should cooperate. It is which parts of competition benefit from cooperation, and which must remain competitive.

Precedent

Comparable markets consolidate around neutral infrastructure.

Visa: Connected fragmented banks into a single transaction network without becoming a bank.
CME and ICE: Built the neutral venues that aggregated fragmented traders into shared liquidity.
Evolution: Demonstrates the economics of the supplier layer: roughly 66% EBITDA margins serving 800+ operators.
Online poker: The one place the industry built shared liquidity between competitors: six US states, pooled players across licensed operators, money settling between them. It works. It has never extended beyond poker.
Betfair: Showed twenty-five years ago that players will bet against players at scale. But it proved the product, not the supplier layer: still a destination players must visit, never something operators could distribute to their own customers.
And now, in adjacent markets: Robinhood offers prediction markets by connecting to Kalshi rather than building its own exchange. ICE and CME have made similar moves around event markets. Distribution is moving onto shared rails, not another destination.

The boundary

A neutral layer only works if it stays thin.

The layer coordinates pooling, matching and settlement. The operator keeps identity, wallet, brand and the customer.

This is the whole discipline of the model. A network that holds the customer is not infrastructure. It is another competitor, and no rival will connect to it.

Larger prize pools are only part of the case. A shared network lets smaller operators run products they could never sustain alone, and lets larger ones deepen engagement without giving up the customer.

The hard part

Deep pools are necessary. They are not sufficient.

Connecting pools solves depth. It does not make a market healthy. A shared pool inherits every hard problem peer-to-peer has always had, and amplifies the cost of getting them wrong.

Skill balance: Sharp players eat casual players. Unmanaged, the casuals leave, the pool gets sharper, and liquidity dies from the bottom. Pools need skill-tiered contests, so casual players win often enough to stay and strong ones have somewhere real to climb.
Prize design: Deep pools drift toward jackpots, and jackpots feel like lotteries. When winning stops feeling earned, skilled players have nothing to express and casual players are one bad weekend from leaving. The formats that endure keep the shot at a million while letting skill stay visible: tiers, ladders, satellites.
Integrity: Collusion, multi-accounting, bots and dumped matches all get worse when players are each other’s counterparty. A shared pool raises the stakes further, because bad actors can move across operators. Detection standards must hold network-wide, even while identity stays with each operator.
Settlement between competitors: In a shared pool, money moves between rivals. Who grades results, who holds funds mid-contest, what happens when an operator disputes or defaults. Poker networks solved this under a formal interstate agreement, and it took years. The mechanics are known. The coordination is the work.
Jurisdiction: Licences are local. Pools want to be global. A shared pool has to respect every border it crosses, and in some places the honest answer today is that markets cannot mix. Saying so is part of the design.
The contribution problem: The largest operators already supply most of the liquidity, so why would they share it? Those contributing most must be better off inside the network than outside, or it never starts.

These are not software problems first. They are market-design problems, the kind exchanges and clearing houses were built to solve.

Where this comes from

The thesis started as a product, not an observation.

In 2019 I launched PunterClash with a one-versus-one peer-to-peer format. Players understood it immediately. But they wanted something bigger: not 1,000 naira to win 900, but a small stake and a real shot at a million. That requires a pool, and more players than one operator has.

We took that first version as far as it could go and shut it down in 2021. I came back to it in 2024 to rebuild it properly. PunterClash is now a licensed Nigerian sportsbook, with OddScore, the format I have been chasing since 2018, built on it.

I can already see the ceiling my own product will reach at scale. It is the same one the whole peer-to-peer category eventually hits, and it does not move without neutral infrastructure.

Richard OwoyemiFounder, PeerGaming · Managing Director, PunterClash