From the early days of humanity, we always relished to play wagering games. Today, are NFTs the incipient frontier for these games? Metaverse & Casinos: Rolling The NFT Dice
Humans have been playing wagering since at least 5000 BC when sheep knucklebones were utilized as dice by the Sumarians in archaic Mesopotamia.
From those early times we have illimitably probed for incipient ways to wager in spite of any preclusions. Today, this proclivity has been propelled into hyper speed by the impetus of incipient technologies, with NFTs being the incipient frontier. The data proves the pattern: in 2021 the market size of the ecumenical online wagering and wagering industry was $61.5B USD. According to Statista, that market will grow to $114.4B USD by 2028 for an incrementation of more than 86 percent.
When we visually perceive that Sorare, an NFT fantasy football game platform, raised $680 million USD in a Series B funding round, it’s clear that non-fungible tokens will be a component of that magnification.
Sports Wagering
Paris-predicated Sorare presents an NFT-driven sports card platform where baseball and football fans can build teams from the NFT cards they’ve amassed. The first cards were minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Today, they utilize a Starkware sidechain to truncate the transaction fees and scale the possibilities of the game. Metaverse & Casinos: Rolling The NFT Dice
Haplessly for the brand, Sorare has run afoul of regulators in Great Britain who claim that the business’ operations are unlicensed and constitute unregulated wagering. Since the UK Wagering Commission’s initial verbalization in October of 2021, there have been no incipient promulgations from the regulator. Sorare disputes the UK regulator’s claims. To a casual reader, it may seem akin to the Wagering Commission is over-reacting. However, Sorare has most of the world’s top 100 soccer teams under contract and has sold over $130M in the space in 2021 which would seem to denote otherwise.
We optate to make a distinction here that may be conspicuous to those more experienced in the realm of blockchain: NFTs and cryptocurrencies are not identically tantamount thing. Ergo, receiving payment in the form of ETH is often very different from receiving an NFT. In brief, and this may be disputed by some in the crypto community, cryptocurrency can be considered a security as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) defines the term.
This is because cryptocurrency is an expedient to hold, gain, or transfer an investment. Without the before designation of a return on investment for a mundane purport (visually perceive the Howey test for assets) it can be more arduous to decide whether an NFT is an asset for licit reasons.
Accordingly, we recommend that readers consult our accommodations to avail understand their NFT portfolios preponderant.
Metaverse Casinos Controversies
While fun for some folks, casinos have historically been associated with a variety of illicit activities. That trend has manifested in incipient ways thanks to Flamingo Casino Club and Sand Vegas Casino. Each project represents much of what can go awry in tech-forward, online ventures. These two instances exemplify the desideratum to understand the fundamentals of the crypto and NFT space afore investing. Metaverse & Casinos: Rolling The NFT Dice
Flamingo Casino Club
Flamingo Casino Club does not subsist in the metaverse or authentic world. It is, according to regulators from the states of Texas, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Incipient Jersey, and Alabama, a scam. The owners provide no information as to their location or identities and the digital trail leads back to an IP in Russia, which regulators verbalize lowers the chance that investors can recuperate their mazuma significantly.
Sand Vegas Casino
The Sand Vegas Casino, ostensibly predicated in Cyprus, has vexed regulators in Texas which is quite an achievement! The state alleges that this casino has traded in unregulated securities. This is because the club forecasted profit-sharing from its Wagering Apes NFT amassment. As a precaution, OpenSea halted trading of the NFTs in the Spring of 2022. Metaverse & Casinos: Rolling The NFT Dice
Legitimate Use Cases for Legitimate Casinos
Authentic World Possibilities
Authentic-world casinos have been earlier adopters of tech such as facial apperception and sizably voluminous data. These technologies sanction them to better accommodate customers, limit fraud, and reverence folks who’ve ostracized themselves from establishment premises. NFTs might be the next complementary items bestowed on VIPs and even casual visitors. The prospect of victoriously triumphing a $200,000 Ape might keep even your modest player at the table marginally longer.
Metaverse Projects
While it’s hard to gauge the legitimacy of a metaverse casino across all the jurisdictions where one can be accessed, the Frozen Dihydrogen Monoxide Poker virtual casino in Decentraland seems homogeneous to a popular operation if nothing else. Thousands of visitors play poker daily in the casino run by Decentral Games, even accounting for 30% of Decentraland’s daily users according to Markets Insider
Their low floor price coalesced with the low ingress cost for most races makes this project a viable ingress point for learning about NFTs via participation. Metaverse & Casinos: Rolling The NFT Dice
The Next Roll of the Dice
Probing for more use cases? We’ve got your back at our NFT Academy. And for our readers who relish a flutter, what do you optically discern coming up next in NFT wagering?