The company verifies that WINiota is the first decentralized on-Tangle provably fair Casino & Sportsbetting platform. But there are also voices that are critical of the WINIota project. We will analyze this project intensively in the coming weeks.

According to the schedule on the web site, Winiota intends to start services in July 2018. That’s why we’re introducing this here. A detailed description of the concept is given in the so-called whitepaper on the website. We have reproduced some of the most important statements of the white paper in the following section.

The Whitepaper says:“ Online gambling is very popular in the fast paced digital world today, with the market volume of online gambling forecasted to reach 51.96 billion U.S. dollars in 2018, more than doubling since 2009. People can play in the comfort of their own homes or offices and can replicate much of the gaming excitement found from playing in traditional casinos, but the online gaming industry has many issues that directly/indirectly originate from the basis of trust. These issues can be anything from the algorithm in random number generators to the management of users’ balance account. Also, if we take a look at the counterparts such as BitDice and Nitrogen Short which are operating on the Ethereum Blockchain, you will see that heavy traffic takes a toll on their operations and also, the users are handicapped by the transactional fees which may take away the immersion of their gaming excitement. WINiota is addressing the issue of trust and scalability by implementing the provably fair mechanism to all games, inclusive of the sportsbooks, by facilitating IOTA’s tangle, a directed acyclic graph (DAG) for storing transactions in the network. Player will be able to “take a look under the hood” at all times; Now users can see everything: transactions, bets, and most importantly, the mechanism of “Provably Fair”.

For all who have now become curious WINIota has made a small demo online. Everyone can try it out here http://demo.winiota.com/board

Also, WINiota seeks to provide a set of utilities: namely for raffles, gameplay, voting and white labels. To briefly describe, WIT holders are entitled weekly to community rewards chosen by the aforementioned Provably Fair mechanism, in which 50% of profits from

WINiota says casino & betting platform are distributed fairly.

Online gambling platforms today are plagued with controversial issues: The opaque mechanism and inefficient transaction procedures. Most importantly, there is simply no way of knowing what is happening inside the casino’s servers and how the mechanisms are programmed. There is often an air of mistrust and most people have the impression that online gambling is rigged to disfavour the players unethically. In this scenario, players need to rely on trusting the casino, However, like any other business, online gambling has a business model in place designed to ensure its profitability, so ‘trusting the casino’ to act in your favour is not the most ideal approach. Most online gambling operators have set forth their own rules concerning payments, including deposit and withdrawal limits, verification procedures, accepted currencies, fees, and processing time-frames. Withdrawal are often charged to players at an exorbitant rate and they are often a tedious procedure. Collecting what you have earned while betting online should be just as simple as depositing but unfortunately, the process is not as instantaneous. To submit a withdrawal request, players need to select a withdrawal method they intend to use, input their banking details and confirm the amount they want to cash out. The withdrawals will take some time as the casino needs to verify the request in order to ensure the player is indeed eligible for a cash-out. Overall, the gambling experience is tedious as the general idea of these barriers to withdrawal is to keep players in the gambling so as to profit the operators further. Often, players return during the wait time to gamble further, and this is in favour of the operators due to the idea of house edge.

These unfriendly features associated with the withdrawal procedures will be largely mitigated by the beauty of Tangle network. Simply put, there will be no hot wallet on the WINIota platform as Tangle allows the establishment of a flash channel that facilitates the flow of stakes Gambling with WINiota cannot be anymore efficient and WINIOTA owe it all to the beauty of IOTA’s Tangle network. Moving on, to introduce the concept of house edge: the odds advantage in its favor which represents the average gross profit the casino can reliably expect to make from each game. On the games with the lowest house edge, the smallest advantage, a casino might only be generating about a 1 to 2% profit. On other games, it may make profits of up to 15 to 25% or more.

With the theory of house edge introduced, WINiota highlights the issue of transparency

House edge is considerably fair in general; casinos are business and business are run with the idea to profit in return of a service, which in this case is to provide entertainment to the players. However, on certain occasion, it is possible for house edge to be rigged to favour the odds of the house even further, especially if the gambling mechanism is digitalised. The pills in digital roulette do not obey the law of physics, rather, they behave as told by the strings of code driving them around the pixelated roulette. WinIOTA cannot rule out the possibility of rigged odds until they can fully see the mechanism behind the calculation of outcomes in online gambling games.

When the integrity of the mechanism is doubtful, the ethics of casino operators are deemed questionable and WINIota does not condone any of such behaviours in there business model. This is why they seek to integrate IOTA into online gambling.“

Over the next few weeks and months, public IOTA will keep an eye on the IOTA application WINIota and in particular will report on how things are going to continue and how the white paper’s goals are being implemented. But we will also pursue the voices that believe that WINIota is not a project based on top of the Tangle.