The Evolution of Blockchain Implementation in Casinos and the Gambling Industry

What do you imagine when we say “casino”? Long endless green tables, the clanking sound of coins, table dealers, throwing casino tokens. That’s an image of casinos in the 90s.

Nowadays more and more casinos move to online, because people like to gamble using laptops or mobile phones, from the safety of their houses. By gambling in a casino, you also spend a lot for drinks and other entertaining stuff.

By gambling online you spend the money only for making bets, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you get more fun. Blockchain casino is the same on the surface as the online casino, but it’s based on different principles. We’ll get to it later. 

Currently, the gambling industry is growing like never before, thanks to the increased penetration of the Internet. Now anyone can play casino games, using a simplest smartphone.

The value of the market reached nearly $449.3 billion in 2018, that’s a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 4.1% since 2014. Now the expected growth of the market is going to reach 5.9% of a compound annual growth rate, and the size of the market will be at $565.4 billion by 2022.

Online casinos and blockchain casinos will profit a lot from this growth: based on some estimates, their market will double by 2024, hitting the mark of $94 billion.

So, what’s the difference between blockchain casinos and the regular online casinos? Let’s find out. 

Blockchain in Casinos: Story So Far

What’s the best thing about the blockchain technology? It can be absolutely transparent if it’s necessary. The problem of all online casinos are the lack of trust between the player and the house.

Player doesn’t know what’s behind the interface of the game, even if it’s a reputable casino. All gambling businesses, doesn’t matter if they are run online or offline, are the subjects to regulations, and should follow the same rules.

All automatic gaming machines, that are programmed to return a certain percentage of the bet pool to players, should return from 80% to 99.9%. Some “gray” gambling sites violate these rules, as they don’t care about reputation: they can simply change the domain and start from the scratch with a new name.

The old domain gets abandoned, and its owners disappear with all collected money. People try to compile blacklists of fraudulent casinos, but the new ones still appear. 

What are the main problems of these blacklisted casinos? According to various sources, such as Casino.org, the main reasons of adding casinos to a blacklist are: 

Lack of payment - People play not only for fun, but also for money. That’s why it’s important for casinos to be honest with payments. Some casinos allow to withdraw money quickly, some payments can take up to 30 days, but in general they have to pay to stay in whitelists.

The fraudulent online casinos can lie about sending a paycheck, which won’t ever get to your mailbox, or just tell a player that he’s not qualified to make a withdrawal, as he doesn’t meet some requirements on the size of the deposit.

• Lack of randomness - every casino has to use a Random Number Generator, to make all spins, rolls and deals are completely random. Every player can still have a long losing or winning streak, but it’s based rather on luck. However, the RNG mechanism can be rigged to alter the chances, it becomes impossible to win and that’s another reason to blacklist the casino. 
• False advertising - some casinos love to attract people via offering a ton of bonuses, but getting these bonuses is almost impossible: there are many requirements that’s impossible to meet, thus not many users can claim them.
• Spamming players - all of us have seen our mailboxes filling with some trashy letters with useless offers. These types of casinos like to add their letters to the Spam folder of their registered users. 
• Other questionable practices - Bad support, lack of responses to requests, lack of security and proper encryption, putting at risk their users, or just laggy software, that’s enough to add a casino to blacklist. 

So, how does blockchain technology solve these or at least some of these problems? Lack of payment is solved most easily - if a casino is decentralized, nobody can interfere between the player and the prize pool.

Blockchain allows to build everything on smart contracts, so every game could be a direct interaction between two players via a smart contract, or between one player and a smart contract. There’s no house, managing money, everything is transparent. The money gets transferred as soon as it’s won or lost, so there’s no need to worry about payouts. 

Lack of randomness is another bad treat of fraudulent casinos, and blockchain technology also offers a solution. Everything in blockchain is transparent, so every transaction, every spin or roll of dice can be checked after playing.

Many blockchain developers also publish the source code for their projects, so everybody can look into the code and verify it. The RNG is also a part of code, so it can be checked too. 

Considering other bad practices, spamming players is impossible if we talk about a truly decentralized blockchain casino, because you don’t need to register with your email address to play, all you need is a blockchain address to start playing. 

Some Blockchain casino projects

Of course, you can find online casinos, such as the UK Gambling Commission Registered PartyCasino, and play there, like thousands of other players. But if you want to try and see the decentralized casinos, you might be interested in:

888TRON - this decentralized casino is run on TRON smart contracts. Has more than 2,000 games, from casual games to the games that you expect to find in a casino: slots, dice, blackjack, poker. It’s one of the most popular decentralized applications on TRON blockchain, more than 40% of TRON transactions belong to it. 

CasinoFair - works on Ethereum, but accepts many cryptocurrencies, that get exchanged to the native FUN tokens of the platform. Offers many games, such as baccarat, poker, slots, roulette, and classic blackjack. Also has some casual games. 

EarnBet - based on EOS blockchain, allows to play baccarat, dice, hilo, crash, and blackjack. Doesn’t require any registration, using EOS user names instead. The casino generates a unique random number for every bet, based on the bet’s id and the seed of the player. 

Conclusion

So, what’s the real value of blockchain technology for casino games? As you have probably understood, it’s a huge step forward for the gambling market.

By switching to blockchain, all casino developers can still make money, by taking a small fee of each bet, but they also have to provide what users need - transparency and honesty, the traits, so badly needed by all players. It will allow to revolutionize the industry and maybe even attract more new players to blockchain casinos.

Of course, regular online casinos won’t disappear, because they already have some good reputation. But it will wipe out many bad actors from this space, allowing users to play and win, and forget about the worries of being deceived by a house.

The author is not associated with any of the projects mentioned.