Despite a crackdown on gambling in the country that has forced several companies to remove gambling apps from the market, China is ripe for blockchain-based casinos. This is the opinion of 
Darin Oliver, a cryptocurrency expert and founder of BlockDraw.
BlockDraw is a blockchain-based casino platform that merges the two hottest topics today—gambling and cryptocurrencies. Oliver feels that the Chinese market will ultimately prove to have a serious impact on online gaming and asserts that cryptocurrency will be the perfect medium.
In an interview with Inside Asian Gaming at the G2E (Global Gaming Expo) in Las Vegas this week, Oliver explained, “From a business standpoint, there’s no question that Asia is a massive growth region for online gaming. One of the ways to understand growth in gambling is to look at internet penetration rates. Countries that have rapidly growing internet penetration rates tend to have high acceptance of new online gamblers.” He added, “Russia, for example, is expected to add 20 million internet users in the next five years. Ukraine will add 5 to 10 million. But China is estimated at 120 million—that’s the size of a large country!”
In addition to the Internet penetration, Oliver points out that the biggest crypto markets are currently Eastern Europe, Asia and China. He indicates that these are the same markets associated with gambling, which leads to a “unique opportunity for a new industry to occur in that space.”
“When you have these new opportunities for a financial industry to occur and you have growth occurring in certain sectors, it represents an incredible opportunity which is why I’m very bullish on online gambling, particularly crypto-only online gambling,” says Oliver.
In response to the Chinese crackdown on crypto, he doesn’t believe it can stand up for long. “The idea that they can block crypto is nonsense. These countries already have problems with their currencies—every country in Eastern Europe struggles to have faith in their currency and the same rings true of the Chinese,” Oliver asserts.
There is still one huge obstacle that needs to be overcome for BlockDraw to be successful—that of market volatility. Says Oliver, “We’re trying to come up with a solution to create a stable token for our platform.”
