The exchange being constructed is going to be very interesting. Bittrex delisting and cryptopia failing was not good but having your own independent exchange will be a huge step forward.
With the Bitbay base code, can other 3rd party teams built services on top of it? It seems ideal for futures or sports betting, and you could have hosts of independent fully automated stores with auto escrow for high value items like bullion.
Yes it can. In the future the community will be able to create a library of both open source and closed source dapps.
These smart contracts can run "under the hood" in any website that wishes to integrate BitBay as a payment option. And since BitBay is already providing a price stabilizing mechanism, it gives us that much more appeal to be used as a payment method!
The automated escrow is key to keeping the contracts trustless. And when you no longer need a middleman to host the contract, you can cut out the fees associated with them.
This puts more money back into the pockets of the users!