VIENNA, Austria–Last September, the Viennese startup Hero launched its ICO in Vienna. It was the first ICO in Austria and one of the first in Europe within a clear legal framework.

Hero’s situation is unique: their new coin offering HEROcoin ($PLAY) was born out of the need to take their already successful esports prediction platform (herosphere.gg) to the next level. Before issuing HEROcoin ($PLAY), herosphere.gg already had more than 250k registered users.

The problem with traditional betting is that you are losing money by paying a middle man, “the house”. From the start, herosphere.gg cut out the middleman, making sure that the community – not the house – always wins by allowing peer to peer betting.

By introducing the blockchain to the game it is now possible to go against the paradigms of the traditional online betting industry: intransparency, risk of manipulation, third party dependency.