In this interview with CalvinAyre.com’s Becky Liggero, Zerado COO Imogen Bunyard discusses how cryptocurrency can potentially solve of the transaction fee issues that the online gambling industry is facing today.
Digital currencies like bitcoin and their underlying technologies are continuing to make inroads into many areas of online commerce, and the online gambling sector is starting to take notice.
Online gambling has historically been the target of misguided government policies that aim to protect state-owned gambling monopolies, while also restricting the individual’s freedom to decide how they spend their entertainment dollars.
Then comes cryptocurrency.
“The real benefits of bitcoin come in a fact that it’s used pretty internationally, it’s a pretty stable infrastructure because so many people have adopted it because of its fame,” Imogen Bunyard, chief operating officer of technology and consulting company Zerado, told CalvinAyre.com.
When the online gambling industry first heard about cryptocurrency, one of the benefits operators were told was that it will remove transaction fees. Bunyard, however, clarified that there’s still a long way to go before online commerce will see zero transaction fees.
“There’s an entire community driving the politics behind this, so the speed and any of the latency cause and any of the costs, that is determined by the amount of people on the network and what they decide by consensus that the bitcoin and the distributed server processing system ethereum networks should continue to do, what rules they should have. So until people decide to come together and create a network where transaction fees are priority, that’s not realistically going to happen,” Bunyard said.
Currently, several platforms have started moving to the blockchain. For instance, Cash Poker Pro has set out to create a decentralized online poker room based on the blockchain technology. Herosphere is also promising to do the same, but for esports and prediction platforms.
Both startups have dedicated tokens their players can use exclusively on their betting platforms. This, according to Bunyard, may be the first step towards removing transaction fees.
“What you can do, though, is to take your own token, your own casino coin, create that and peg that to the currency that they are operating in so they can see you become the financial transactor, almost a forex, and when they bring their local currency in so you can then convert this cryptocoin into a digital version of a casino chip, so you’re still playing with the benefits of the tokenized value, you can see where it moves, you can see the traceability and obviously that has real value for any anti-money laundering tracing but equally then you are not getting the volatility of the cryptocurrency markets but equally then you are not getting the transaction fees,” Bunyard said.
