The FansUnite team is extremely excited to announce that Peter Kroll has joined the FansUnite Advisory Board. We met Peter a few months back at a blockchain conference and immediately hit it off, sharing the vision of building a protocol for the sports betting industry. After some initial calls and feedback from Peter, we solidified the relationship to have him join the team.

Peter is a serial entrepreneur and computer science major who specialized in cryptography at Wilfrid Laurier University. He has over 9 years of sports betting industry experience, working with Pinnacle as a developer, team leader and development manager.

Peter first delved into cryptocurrency in spring 2011 after hearing about Bitcoin through Slashdot.org. After reading the whitepaper, he instantly knew this technology was for real and would change the world.

A month later, Peter read about a miner who was hacked for 25,000 bitcoins. He quickly became paranoid about Bitcoin security and began a project to store his bitcoins offline, which had never been done before. In September 2011, Peter’s Bitcoin paper wallet was born and open sourced to the world at bitaddress.org

The stars aligned for FansUnite to bring on a team member with years of experience in not just cryptocurrency, but sports betting as well. We’re looking forward to having Peter as part of our project to build a decentralized, efficient and transparent sports betting protocol.

As a veteran of the sports-betting industry, a long time technologist, and an early adopter of the cryptocurrency market, Peter’s resume speaks for itself. To give you a better of idea of the kind of industry powerhouse we’re dealing with, we sat down with Peter to get his take on FansUnite:

Q: As an advisor, what are you looking to contribute to the FansUnite team or how are you planning to support their efforts?

Peter: When I first met Darius, we were casually chatting about the intersection of sportsbetting and blockchain. Darius shared with me the FansUnite project. I gave him some feedback and we quickly realized we’d like to work together towards the same goal: a global protocol for the whole industry. This protocol will become a platform that pools the world’s liquidity and brings betting data into the public eye, where math players can refine their models. This would be a true open playing field. I’m going to advise on the technical architecture and the token economics, as well as reach out to the industry and let people know we have a serious project and we want them to join the movement to bring liquidity to this open market.

Q: With the recent Supreme Court Decision, how do you see the Blockchain changing the Sports Betting space?

Peter: I think the US Supreme Court decision is good for personal freedom. It’s now a 50 state maze that needs to be navigated. There is also the question of fair taxation policy, which exists in Canada, but not the USA. I think blockchain is pushing the boundaries and fundamentally the gambling industry is too high risk for traditional banks and the trend is towards more cryptocurrency powered gambling.

Q: What excites you the most about the FansUnite Protocol?

Peter: I take a global view and think we need to bring the freedom to wager to everyone through an open and unstoppable decentralized protocol. The FansUnite Protocol is built for traditional books and betting exchanges. It addresses the mechanics needed to bring real world data into a blockchain in a trust minimized and trust distributed way. It also designs speed of resolution with the need to dispute mistakes. We are taking what we’ve learned through industry experience and building a blockchain protocol on top of Ethereum that traditional books can plug into using a Javascript library. We are disintermediating everyone between the bettor and the bookmaker. A fun feature is that you will be able to wager with any ERC20 tokens. So it’s another way to gamble with your “bags”.

Q: How long do you think it’ll take before we see mainstream Blockchain adoption?

Peter: We are on the second wave of blockchain adoption. The first was blockchain as money and this second phase is the token economy or stock market. I think we are 3 years away from another massive adoption wave that will bring the mainstream.

Q: What does the future hold, not only for you but for the decentralized landscape?

Peter: Having a legacy in this space, I’m bound to be moving the puck forward in some way with blockchain. I continue to invest in the space as a fund manager. I also advise on select projects and look for places to make meaningful human impacts. I think we will see the decentralized lifestyle disrupt power generation and distribution. It will cause a re-think of the world reserves of value (gold, oil, dollars). Disruption is already occurring in the stock market and crowdfunding space. Identity systems that power the global passport program will change. Along with an overhaul of land titling, taxation and tariff systems. Blockchains allows us to build systems that are bigger than any community therefore many communities can be coordinated in an open way.

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