Traditional gambling is typically an exercise in smoke and mirrors. Casinos rig machines to ensure that the house takes the lion’s share of the profits. Players are given just enough hope to come back, but never enough information to know they are being conned. Even in the digital space, online casinos generally provide no means for the player to verify the mechanisms behind their betting experience. Whether physical or online, players are usually at a painful disadvantage against a greedy house.

Fortunately, the capabilities of the blockchain will help usher in a new sense of honesty and transparency in the betting world. ‘Provably fair’ will become the industry standard. It’s a mechanism by which players can verify the authenticity of the house’s actions. For instance, if you’re playing blackjack on a provably fair platform, you will be given a means to check that shuffles are not rigged against you.

A provably fair online casino would have the player receive a hash of the serverseed from the platform; it’s an encrypted number given in advance of a wager. With this, the player can later verify that the house’s outcome was not altered. Since this number is encrypted, neither the player nor the platform can use this hash to manipulate results. The player also generates an encrypted number — a clientseed — which likewise ensures that the player cannot alter their outcome unfairly. Taken together, mutual accountability is established since both the house and the player provide each other a ‘secret’ code allowing each party to later verify one another.

For platforms like ours that wager on real life events rather than dice rolls or card draws, provably fair means that the algorithms we use to operate are openly visible to everyone. You as a player get to see exactly where the currency goes. If a platform claims that they only take 4% of the pot, you can verify that by observing the Smart Contract.

One hurdle to the provably fair standard is simply education. Users currently may not understand how to read and verify algorithms or even be aware that these systems can (and should) be made visible. But once it catches the average user fanbase, there is no longer a reason to tolerate the old guard. When provably fair becomes the status quo, platforms will be meeting a long overdue standard of fairness and transparency.