How CashBet Coin Solves Online Gambling Payment Delays
Speed of payment is a massive pain point for real money iGaming players today. The greater majority of online casinos are still entrenched in the traditional banking model, which is unfortunately laden with middlemen each charging their own transaction and processing fees. When the player goes to withdraw winnings, that kicks off a process of getting internal approval, sending the request to the bank, getting the bank’s approval, getting the players bank’s approval and getting it released to the player. It can take on average 3–5 business days to withdraw and finally receive their winnings from an online casino — all of this costing time, money and opening up room for errors. Plus, by requiring the player to put money on deposit, ethical and legal obligations are created.
Cryptocurrencies like CashBet Coin present a welcome departure from lags of traditional banking, enabling funds to be sent between parties more efficiently. Still, when looking at the typical blockchain solution being used by crypto casinos, there’s room for improvement to make the player’s transaction experience even better.
The Typical Blockchain Solution
The Ethereum smart contracts platform is considered a “stateful” solution because each block contains information on the entire state of the blockchain. As you can imagine, that is a LOT of information getting stored in nodes and taxing compute power.
Let’s put this in the context of an iGaming session where a player may be making 10 slot machine pulls. During the course of gameplay, the player’s balance may be going up and down as he wins or loses on each pull of the slot machine. At the end of his session, he ends up with a positive balance of $100 and requests a withdrawal.
In a fully logged stateful network, each one of these slot machine pulls would be considered an individual transaction between the player and the casino. And each transaction gets recorded, requiring confirmation time, taking up space on the blockchain, and costing gas fees that eat into the player’s winnings.
The Better Blockchain + State Channels Solution
With CashBet Coin’s CryptoGo technology, we’re excited to reduce this timeframe from days to seconds. By joining blockchain with a state channels approach, we can cut out the need for microtransactions (in our example, slot machine pulls) to be recorded on the blockchain and only record the final outcome of the gameplay. Additionally, with state channels, a player would only need to stake the amount of each bet. This eliminates the need for making account deposits, holding excess money in escrow by a casino, and waiting for final settlement.
State channels are two-way dialogues betweens two participants in the form of transactions. Each participant has a private key which they use to sign each transaction to ensure they are verified. The two-way conversation happens privately, off the blockchain, but can be uploaded to the blockchain to show the official final outcome. Either participant can close the channel by sending the final state of transactions to the blockchain. If the other participant agrees with the final state, they simply allow the state channel to close. If they disagree, they can upload their version of the final state. Since transactions are timestamped, the most accurate and final outcome is easily determined.
So in our slots example, for the session of 10 slot pulls, only one transaction would be recorded for the player showing the final outcome of $100. This frees up nodes from storing microtransaction information, saving both time and compute power. For players, the benefits are clear: a private verifiable record of transactions, instant payouts and minimized fees.
