Gambling is one of the fastest growing markets on the planet. The online gambling market alone is set to reach around $100 billion per year by 2025, doubling the $50 billion per year figure today. This is due to the rising accessibility to internet, a boom in mobile gaming, and new regulations allowing more people to participate. This does not include the global gambling market that is now estimated to be over $500 billion, which is also expected to keep growing exponentially.

The gambling industry, as a whole, has been falling behind in adoption of technologies that simplify operations, cut costs, and save the user time. While most casinos are up to date aesthetically, the technology and systems behind the scenes have hardly changed. As modern users demand a simpler and faster experience, casinos will have to eventually adapt to the ever evolving expectations of their customer. In this article, we will dive into why blockchain technology, specifically CasinoCoin, is the next obvious step for this industry to adopt.

Benefits of Blockchain in Casinos

Regulations and Fraud Resistance:

I would like to start with the most obvious benefit of utilizing blockchain technology, fraud resistance and transparency. CasinoCoin will be offering a few tools to help the operator, customer and regulator alike to bring a leading class product regulators will covet. They also are working side by side with the top regulatory bodies in the gambling world, ensuring their products and services meet the highest of standards. KYC (Know Your Customer) and AML (Anti-Money Laundering) are things the gambling market crave. CasinoCoin has found a solution to both of these problems in one ready made application.

CasinoCoin will offer a simple KYC process for gamblers using the revolutionary Bankroll Manager (BRM).

You can find more on the BRM here.

And more about CasinoCoin through their presentation here.

CasinoCoin has partnered with Aver for the KYC process. Users will be required to registered before they use the BRM. Registration is quick and easy, only requiring a few details and some simple photos.

This benefits operators as it ensures all customers are verified and legally allowed to participate in the activity they want. The BRM also is a universal tool for customers to use as they only need to sign up once to gamble with all participating operators.

Secondly, all transactions naturally will be held on the blockchain, which is openly verifiable. By being able to verify transactions, it ensures no one is at an advantage throughout the various stages of the gambling process. This offers greater protection against online fraud and prevents anyone from manipulating data within the chain. All transactions carried out through the blockchain are transparent to everyone.

These measures will stop the many fees casinos receive from regulators from fraudulently play, while also saving time and money trying to prevent this from happening.

Loyalty Programmes

Blockchain will be able to make loyalty programmes easier to operate for both companies and consumers, offering security and cost-efficiency. CasinoCoin is already implementing this use-case with online operator Omnia Casino.

You can read more in depth about loyalty programmes and their partnership here.

Tracking the allocation of points to players and providing them with a secure, closed-loop ecosystem within which to spend their points is a major challenge for operators. Oftentimes, points totals can take hours to update, or not be tracked correctly. Fraud is also prevalent, as the systems are rarely handled with the same security as one would expect with a real-money transaction.

The CasinoCoin blockchain is offering a new type of loyalty solution, which is fully on-chain, completely secure and seamless to integrate.

This solution makes it much faster, secure and cheap to track and support players. Not only does this technology make it simpler to manage the programmes, it also helps create stronger engagement around them. Players will get to hold and spend a branded token, rather than simply a tally of points.

Operators can use CasinoCoin directly for their loyalty programme, or as a branded token. You can read more about CasinoCoin and custom tokens here.

Having a Loyalty Token on the CasinoCoin blockchain will also allow casinos to bridge the gap to all that a casino’s rewards system has to offer. The token will basically be in-house currency, which can be used for anything the casino offers including food, drinks, free play, special offers on vacations, hotel rooms, and more. Operators will then be able to create a Tailor Made solution by analyzing data from the customer. Large companies especially will benefit from this, as they offer a wide variety of things and go into areas of business other than gambling. This branded token will be extremely useful as companies can utilize the lightning fast technology CasinoCoin has to offer while also creating an ecosystem that supports their agenda specifically. CasinoCoin can also be used natively within loyalty programmes, but I foresee most creating a token to be branded with their specific name. This will give them a “walled garden” of sorts, with which they can offer perks exclusively and inside a brand name.

Cash-in and Cash-out Options

The BRM can be utilized inside online casinos as well as land-based casinos. I see online casinos adopting the BRM faster as payments are already digitized to an extent. That being said, there are some very innovative options for casinos and suppliers to use CasinoCoin directly or as a custom token of their choosing.

Direct Play: Operators and casino suppliers now have the ability to utilize CasinoCoin with direct play to their machines. This also could replace the loyalty card, as your phone could potentially be connected to a back-end system supplied by operators.

To play on a machine, all you would need is the BRM (Or a white label from the operator) and a machine that accepts CasinoCoin or a respective custom token. Simply scan a QR code and your funds will be transferred to the machine (within seconds I might add). Slots, table games, and electronic table games are all starting to become more digitized making this a logical next step for operators to employ. Customers would no longer have to carry around a ticket and card or worry about ATM fees. Simply load your wallet, scan the QR code and you’re playing.

Example of Cashless Wallet from IGT

ATM/TITO: Installing the necessary equipment to allow QR scanning might seem like a big step for a lot of operators. They would either need to have it built into the machine (supplier side), or have an add on to existing machines. To side step this problem, operators could still utilize the TITO (ticket in ticket out) system. Almost all casinos have adopted this method of play, eliminating the need to deposit physical coins with each play.

If an operator does not want to go through the work of installing the necessary software and hardware to accept the BRM on their machines, they could use a cryptocurrency ATM machine. The ATM machine will scan a QR code from the customers BRM wallet, transferring coins to the machine and into a paper ticket (or cash). This ticket will then be used just like any other ticket, but instead of being filled by fiat, it is filled by a digital currency. After the customer is done playing, they simply insert the ticket into the ATM, the ATM scans the customers wallet, which then releases those funds. This would be a good step for operators who do not want to spend the time and money on converting all their machines over.

Online and land-based integration: Many land-based casinos have extended their business online, but the land and online parts are not in sync. So, if a person plays Roulette in a land-based casino and wants to continue playing at home after the visit, there will be no data shared between the online and land casino experiences. The player will have different accounts, balances, track records, loyalty points and bonuses. CasinoCoin will be able to bridge this gap as online and land-based casinos are transferred to a shared blockchain ledger, making the process seamless for the customer and operator.

Data Verification/Provably Fair

Data verification is another use-case that CasinoCoin is already implementing with the world’s best roulette manufacturer, Cammegh.

You can find more on their partnership here.

Cammegh is utilizing CasinoCoin’s technology by tracking every single spin of their roulette wheels, creating an immutable audit trail.

“The blockchain could not be a better vehicle to service the gaming industry’s need for ever more accountability and traceability, while enabling Cammegh to supply our customers with more diverse products in a global market, across varied jurisdictions in differing currencies” -Richard Cammegh

This technology could be used for a vast array of applications. Anything that has a need to be tracked or verified could potentially go on the blockchain. This creates a provably fair environment as it ensures each spin or bet is transparent and is not tampered with. This will be a big selling point for Cammegh as casinos can now track patterns and catch fraudulent play much faster and easier. Everything will be visible on the blockchain for all to see, making this a regulators dream.

RFID: (Radio Frequency Identification) backed playing cards or poker chips. This could also be used in the card shoes as well. RFID belongs to a group of technologies referred to as Automatic Identification and Data Capture (AIDC). AIDC methods automatically identify objects, collect data about them, and enter those data directly into computer systems with little or no human intervention. RFID methods utilize radio waves to accomplish this.

At a simple level, RFID systems consist of three components: an RFID tag or smart label, an RFID reader, and an antenna. RFID tags contain an integrated circuit and an antenna, which are used to transmit data to the RFID reader (also called an interrogator). The reader then converts the radio waves to a more usable form of data. Information collected from the tags is then transferred through a communications interface to a host computer system, where the data can be stored in a database and analyzed at a later time.

This data can then be inputted directly onto the CasinoCoin blockchain ensuring each card was dealt properly, no new cards were introduced, nothing was shuffled, and bets/payouts were properly distributed and recorded. This will make it impossible for the house or player to cheat, as this data will again be visible and transparent on the blockchain.

Casino Management Systems

There are many different systems needed to track and analyze data. Loyalty programmes are a common example of a Casino Management System. These systems are paramount for casinos to ensure they are running effectively and efficiently. Some others include Slot Monitoring / Accounting, Slot Ticketing, Cashless Gaming, RFID Table Monitoring, Live Point of Sale Systems for Keno, Bingo, Race and Sports Book, Promotional Kiosks, Hotel, Food and Beverage Point of Sale, Surveillance and Security, Responsible Gaming, Data Warehousing and more. Data is king inside any large organization. Finding abnormalities, customer and employee habits, among many other things, enables the organization to fix problems or improve an experience.

Blockchain will be helpful when investigating discrepancies and disputes, especially with an external project stakeholder, such as a client or subcontractor. For example, if you had scheduled your contractor to send people on a certain date and they send their people too late or too early, everyone on the ledger can verify if the subcontractor made a mistake or not.

Internally, you can also trust the data on the ledger when analyzing business operations to see how much time is spent on tasks, identify opportunities for efficiencies, and other benefits.

You can do the same today with a centralized cloud-based project management suite, but there is a chance of losing some of that data due to downtime from the cloud host or tampering.

Closing Thoughts

There are a lot of systems inside the casino ecosystem, all of which could benefit from the speed, scalability and transparency the CasinoCoin blockchain has to offer. The gambling industry is slow to adopt new and unfamiliar technology. CasinoCoin, though, is at the forefront of regulations, has the best technology blockchain can offer, and has the connections to break down those barriers.

The market for this is huge. CasinoCoin will not only be revolutionizing the market for the gambler, but also the supplier and operators. These markets are not figured into the $600 Billion a year figure. If you account for all of the back-end systems, potential uses in the separate markets mentioned above, along with other use-cases not related to gambling including gaming, micro-transactions, payment solutions and others not even mentioned yet, the market CasinoCoin is targeting is well into the Trillions.

If operators and suppliers are going to massively adopt blockchain technology to solve problems within the gambling and gaming ecosystem, it will be going through the CasinoCoin Foundation.

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CasinoCoin Webpage: https://casinocoin.org/