Unikrn CEO Rahul Sood is excited to be standing at the intersection of blockchain, esports and regulated gambling. Sood sat down with our very own Becky Liggero Fontana on the latest episode of The Long Con, to talk about the developments across the different sectors.
Sood believes the combination of all three sectors coming together, could be a serious triple-threat. Combined, they could drive a wave of new digital innovation in the gambling sector for online and land-based casinos.
During the CoinGeek panel on esports, Sood spoke about the importance of blockchain in the esports market. According to Sood, now is the time for companies to ‘innovate or die.’ Sood went further to clarify his comments from the CoinGeek panel discussion:
“Unfortunately, it takes a global pandemic which I reviewed as an oracle into the future, it’s exactly what I’ve been speaking to traditional land-based casino operators. We talk about esports, video games and the market opportunity with regards to betting on all aspects. The technology that we created at Unikrn enables that in venues that have been humming and hawing about experimenting.”
While plenty of innovation can be found in markets like Las Vegas, Sood believes that the gambling industry is yet to fully go all-in on the combination of esports and blockchain. “When it comes to esports and video games, and sort of thinking about the future customer there’s a lot of protectionism. You can see by the trends the companies that are doing well are the ones who have a really good online digital offering.”
Sood believes that the current market conditions are a silver lining that will force operators to improve their digital offerings. According to Sood, Unikrn has positioned itself to build on the demand for esports and blockchain offerings. “The talk is reflected in the actual demand – it’s growing, our numbers have been very good and we are constantly growing.”
Sood believes that adoption of blockchain by the industry can be one of the catalysts that could spark a recovery in the gambling sector. Streamlining payments by adopting blockchain will have some long-term positive effects. “For payments, there’s no better technology than blockchain, than having to deal with old-school banking technology,” he said. “Getting credit card processes on board, paying massive percentages to different processors in different countries, it’s so fragmented. It’s so much of a nightmare as a business to operate. Whereas with blockchain you can accept payments from anywhere, at any time, and people can do very fast micro bets.”
“The transparency that it offers and the ability for regulators to take a look at betting history customers to get a full betting history on a ledger makes more sense,” Sood added.
In the full episode, Sood offers some fascinating insights into the innovation that is occurring with esports companies utilising blockchain to create some new innovate products across horse racing and digital offerings. And if you haven’t yet, don’t forget to subscribe to the CalvinAyre.com YouTube channel to see all of our new videos as they go up. If you prefer to get your Long Con in a podcast format, you can always subscribe on Google, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
