The long journey from grand casino halls to smartphone mobile apps — let us recount the treacherous path that online gambling ventured and conquered, leading to the technological advancement innovations brought by blockchain technology and crypto-economy.

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Technology and internet in general have changed the way we live our lives drastically. Several technological advancement and widespread internet access enable us to do almost everything digitally. Online gambling industry as a part of the entertainment industry wasn’t spared in the sweeping development brought to us by these technological innovations. Due to these technological advances, online gambling is now one of the most profitable and popular industries since 1990s. It can be found almost everywhere in the world, with a wide range of variety, particularly in the countries of New Zealand and The Netherlands.

Surely, online gambling isn’t as old as the hills, but definitely its history is something worth knowing.

The Birth of Online Gambling

Since the passing of the Free Trade and Processing Act in Antigua and Barbuda in 1994, the online gambling continues to flourish and allowed several companies to be granted license if they wanted to provide online casino services. It was the Caribbean government that first legalized and regulated online gaming. Also, in 1994, a UK company named Microgaming developed and launched its first online casino. It was a momentous event in the development of the online gambling industry and this company still exists today.

CryptoLogic was launched in 1995 and became a significant innovation especially with online money transfers with its fast and safer process. CyptoLogic also launched InterCasino, one of the oldest online casinos that still exists at present. Also, in 1995, Microgaming released its online version of the traditional games such as blackjack, poker, and roulette. NetEnt, a neophyte in the online gambling industry back then, launched its own online games and proved itself to be one of the best and most innovative providers even until today.

From all the widespread development of online gambling throughout the years, online gambling companies all over the world continue to provide eSports, sports betting, novelty betting, in-play betting, bingo, horse racing betting, slots, blackjack, roulette, baccarat, poker in its all forms and other games in the same structure. In short, online gambling became very popular and in 1996, there were 15 gambling websites that became 200 in the following year. In 1998, Planet Poker introduced Texas Hold’Em, making online gambling more accessible to people of the internet.

Legalization: A Bump Down the Road…

Despite the popularity and advancement of online gambling, it reached a low point in 1999 when The Internet Gambling Prohibition Act was approved. The act meant to illegalize any kind of offering of online gambling product to a U.S. citizen. However, this act did not pass and in the same year, a multiplayer online game was introduced so gamers could gamble and chat with each other at the same time.

The struggle continued in year 2000 as the Australian Federal Government passed the Interactive Gambling Moratorium Act banning all unlicensed online casinos existent before May 2000. This happening paved way to several legislations and lawsuits all across the globe. However, that didn’t stop the massive number of online players to continue to grow up to 8 million in year 2001. Online gambling companies’ stocks also continued to rise and reached the value of $4.5 billion in 2002. In 2003, to further regulate online gambling, eCOGRA was established in United Kingdom. eCOGRA was meant to specialize in the certification of online gaming software and systems.

To further the battle on legalization of online gambling industries, the U.S. government pursued national broadcasters and media outlets to ban advertisements for online gambling for they could be illegal. However, Antigua claimed that this could be a violation of the free trade agreement signed in 1994. These seemingly never ending hindrances in online gambling didn’t stop its spread around the world. In September 2006, there were approximately 2,600 online casinos all across the globe.

What the Future Holds

The effects of technological advancement in our lives is truly undeniable. In the world of online gambling, technological innovation didn’t only make it easy and convenient but it paved the way for its progress and popularity it possess. Despite several acts and positive laws to make online gambling safer, many aspects of it are starting to change.

With more positive laws and regulations leaning towards online gambling, Juniper Research estimated that online gambling market will outstretch up to $1 trillion in 2021, citing mobile phones as a major factor in this development.

Surely, these technological advances is just a start of what could be unimaginable several years ago, especially in the world of online gambling. We could probably expect a more realistic and high-quality games enabled by VR technologies and solid security. Moreover, we could also expect a worldwide span of its legalization so as to take online gambling to new levels.

The Next Generation of Online Gambling

Since the invention of Bitcoin in 2008, the nascent blockchain technology has opened the doors to a truly decentralized online ecosystem and it has found its way into countless industries and real-world economies. The uncontested decentralization, transparency and security brought by cryptography and P2P connections bring new solutions into industries that the traditional real-world systems could not resolve.

With this in mind, Faireum wishes to bring these solutions into the online gambling world in order to give players and proprietors alike a fair and value-for-value experience with transparent game logic, a transformed and just business model, and open-source DApp development kits. Investors and coin holders alike can also partake in the ecosystem despite not having participated in online gambling itself with this perfect amalgamation of crypto and online gambling, making gambling more than just a game of chance, but also an opportunity of choice… click here to learn more about this game-changing technology.