The showdown between the government enforcing control and ordinary folk discovering new paths to uphold their freedom never ends. Gambling’s always been around, but it comes with certain social ills. Sometimes people just cannot stop once they get going and casinos take advantage of that. In fact, that’s how they make most of their money – off of whales that can’t resist chasing all the bonuses and prestige. There are also problems like money laundering and crime that gambling can be used as a shell for, and with the Internet and VPNs available, the potential for governments to stop this activity looks bleak.
The second punch accompanying the Internet is cryptocurrency. Governments demand to be able to track whatever money is flowing, where, and why. But Bitcoin and ETH help keep governments out of their hair, even though these chains actually contain a complete history of all transactions, banks are unable to restrict people from engaging in them, and people are always inventing new chains with more secrecy like Monero. With government so often weighing down on online gambling, is crypto the rest-assured destiny for iGaming?
Crypto Gambling 101
The ways that people have traditionally put money on gambling sites and withdrawn them has been using the debit cards of old like Visa and Mastercard. The fees they charge are pretty steep though. E-wallets have been another choice like Skrill and Wise. These take a long time for transfers to complete though and they also shut down a lot. Many transfer systems refuse to deal with casinos due to their tendency to be associated with crime.
Crypto currency meanwhile completes transactions nearly instantaneously, certainly if done using P2P technology. The only potential speed impediment and cost are the gas fees that chains like ETH require. Some casinos operate via digital currencies alone. A lot of these use provably fair algorithms, entailing a seed and a player key, both of which mathematically produce a certain result that was determined at the start of the game so players can see beyond a shadow of a doubt, there was no manipulation or tampering.
Smart contracts govern wagers, payouts, and bonus systems. It all happens automatically on platforms like Baji live casino, so an administrative employee doesn’t have to carry out everything. It’s all really transparent and there aren’t as many disputes. Some slot machines trigger instant payouts on-chain.
Compliance
Even though crypto is pseudonymous, many licensed operators integrate identity verification systems alongside wallet tech. APIs from providers like Jumio or Onfido link blockchain deposits with KYC-compliant accounts, balancing regulatory requirements with crypto’s speed.
Security
Casinos use multi-signature wallets too along with hardware security modules and encryption standards to keep players’ money safe. Nowadays, dual-factor authentication is a big trend too to deter too large of transfers and mixing service usage. A player’s experience might feel as simple as scanning a QR code and hitting “Send,” but under the hood, dozens of technologies—from wallet APIs to blockchain validators—are working together to ensure the money lands safely in the casino’s balance system.
Crypto Game Genres
Going back to Provably Fair, this has been a matter of principle to a lot of people. There are a lot of fake websites cheating people and they love taking advantage of blockchain’s certainty. Unfortunately, a lot of games like poker and blockchain feature too many factors to easily integrate Provably Fair, so crypto games from the get-go stuck with games using fewer variables.
Dice
When Bitcoin took off, this became the simplest yet iconic game to play on blockchain. It was a simple 0 to 100 roll. Think Primedice and DuckDice.
Crash Games
Players progress through a particular game and they can pull out and take their winnings at any time as long as they do it before a crash happens, such as a plane taking off, a footballer falling down, or a leapfrogger falling into the water. Yet the longer they do wait, if it pans out, the bigger the reward.
This too is an easy algorithm to plug into a hash. Such games were originally thought of since they’re emblematic of the crypto industry itself – growing, growing, and growing higher until at some point it can randomly crash without a warning. These games are also great social games, since they have a chat and everybody is playing at the same time on the same crashes. Then leaderboards are displayed along with the multiplier results from the past rounds.These games cater spectacularly to millennials and Gen-Z-ers who hate to wait and want to see results now, hence why those are the biggest audiences for them. Games nowadays are evolving ever shorter potential payouts like this to keep people hooked, just as sports betting has long since added in prop bets.
Other quick RPG games include coin flips, rock paper scissors, wheel spins, mines, and plinko.
Crypto Sportsbooks
This is one of the fastest growing crypto segments for many of the same reasons as mentioned above. One of the simple reasons is payments from certain regions were blocked by payment processors. Now, they can use good old fashioned bitcoin or some kind of stablecoin like USDT. But from that point, it expanded into a distinctly crypto-native niche.
Price Betting
Instead of betting on who wins a tennis or a football match, players bet on the short-term movement of token prices. We’re talking within the next five minutes, using multipliers and odds relying on real-time price feeds.
Esports
This has flourished too, since video games are huge among young people whose lives heavily revolve around tech anyway. People get instant, tokenized payouts. Without crypto, these people get delayed withdrawals or might not get winnings at all.
NFTs
These have found a completely new life in the gambling world. What started out as art collectibles has found so much more purpose in the past several years. These are serving as souvenirs from particular tournaments. Tickets to take part in tournaments are issued in the form of these NFTs, as are an endless list of other things, like free spins, multipliers, rewards, and VIP passes.
If you’ve played at a casino for a long time and earned a set of perks due to your track record, you’ll often get an NFT certifying that. It goes far beyond that though with NFTs used as in-game chips, weapons, and avatars. There’s an entire secondary market for NFTs like these. They are resold and bought by other people from those who no longer plan to use them or who want to flipp them for extra money.
Then there are NFT jackpots. Some rare NFTs are given out to winners which can appreciate over time. So these are very effective engagement tools, so effective that even big corporations are now making their own NFTs, like Nike and Mercedes.