Alright, let's cut the crap. You're here because you saw "SX" in a headline and you're trying to figure out what the hell it is. Good luck with that. Because depending on which glossy press release you read, "SX" is either the future of degenerate crypto sports gambling or a giant, boring undersea cable connecting Australia and New Zealand.
Yeah, you read that right.
One minute, I'm reading a press release, SX Bet Bets Big on Berachain: Bringing Web3 Sports Betting to Bera, that promises to let you bet on the Knicks game using a stablecoin called "$HONEY" to earn a receipt token called "$SXBRT" that you can stake to get a governance token called "$BGT." It’s a word salad of incentives designed to make your head spin until you forget you’re just throwing money at a screen.
The next minute, a different press release lands in my inbox. The SX Tasman Express to boost Australia–New Zealand bandwidth is a multi-million dollar project to lay 16 pairs of fiber optic cables on the ocean floor. We’re talking 400 terabits of capacity for "AI-driven cloud regions" and "next generation digital applications." It’s the kind of serious, big-boy infrastructure that makes telecom executives puff out their chests.
So, what gives? Is this some kind of schizophrenic branding exercise? Are the crypto bros hedging their bets by getting into the plumbing business? Or is the infrastructure world so desperate for a little sizzle that they’re borrowing branding from a Web3 casino? Honestly, it feels like finding out your hard-nosed accountant has a weekend gig as a Vegas magician. It just don't add up.
The Web3 Shell Game
Let's start with the shiny object: SX Bet. They’re boasting some big numbers—$675 million wagered, 93% year-over-year growth. Impressive, I guess, if you believe the on-chain metrics aren't just a handful of whales washing trades back and forth. They claim "winners are welcome," which is a hilarious line every sportsbook uses right before they limit your account for winning too much.
The whole thing is built on this premise of "shared liquidity" and being a "protocol anyone can build on." Andrew Young, the project lead, says they’re not just a dApp, but an "entire Web3 betting ecosystem." Translation: they want to be the house, the table, the chips, and the guy selling you overpriced drinks. They’re building a system that looks like a decentralized paradise, but it’s really just a more complicated funnel to get your money. This entire ecosystem of tokens—$HONEY, $SXBRT, $BGT—isn't about empowering you; it's a loyalty program on steroids. It’s like a casino giving you special, branded chips that you can only cash out for raffle tickets to win a different kind of chip. The goal is to keep you inside their walls, playing their game.
Is it a better way to bet? Maybe, if your primary concern is avoiding the all-seeing eye of traditional finance and you get a thrill from financial engineering. But for the average person who just wants to put twenty bucks on the Lakers, is this really progress? Or is it just adding three layers of unnecessary complexity to a transaction that was already simple enough?
The Big Boring Cable
Then you have the other SX. The Tasman Express. This thing is the polar opposite of the crypto hype machine. It’s cold, hard, physical infrastructure. I can almost picture the boardroom meeting: a bunch of guys in gray suits looking at nautical charts and talking about latency and branching unit technology. There’s no talk of airdrops or governance tokens here. The prize isn't some fleeting digital asset; it's a fat, juicy contract to provide the digital backbone for corporations and governments. Completion is scheduled for 2028. There's no instant gratification, just years of planning and laying cable in the dark, cold depths of the Tasman Sea.
This is the stuff that actually makes the modern world run. Not blockchains, not dApps, but massive, unbelievably expensive fiber optic cables. Without these pipes, there’s no Netflix, no cloud computing, and offcourse, no way for SX Bet to even exist.
So why the shared name? Why would a project backed by serious players like Southern Cross and Alcatel want to share a moniker with a crypto gambling site that’s not even available in the United States? It feels… messy. It feels like a branding team got lazy. Unless, that is, there's a thread connecting these two wildly different worlds.
And there is. It’s called venture capital. A firm named CoinFund, which has been around since 2015, lists "SX Network" in its portfolio. One of their new hires, Kavan Canekeratne, apparently led the investment. Suddenly, the picture gets a lot clearer. This isn't a branding mistake. This is a portfolio. "SX" isn't a company with a coherent vision; it's a label slapped on different investments made by the same pot of money. They're betting on the entire pipeline. They want to own the digital roads under the sea and the casinos that operate on top of them.
It's a bold strategy, I'll give them that. They see a future where data flows through their pipes and bets flow through their protocols, and they get a cut of everything, and we just… pay. It's a bet on owning the infrastructure of vice and the infrastructure of commerce, all under one meaningless, two-letter umbrella. Then again, maybe I'm the one overthinking it. Maybe some VC just really likes the letters S and X.
Same Letters, Different Hustle
At the end of the day, don't let the branding fool you. Whether it's a peer-to-peer betting exchange or a subsea data cable, the game is the same. It's about building the plumbing and charging a toll. One is just dressed up in the futuristic, jargon-heavy language of Web3, and the other is presented with the boring, corporate-speak of physical infrastructure. But both are about creating a system where you are the user, the product, and the revenue stream. The "SX" doesn't stand for anything other than another entry in a rich guy's spreadsheet.
