What is happening to gambling on blockchain?
2017 was the golden age for ICOs. It seemed that the future of computer games and gambling in particular belonged to the blockchain technology. No one had any doubts about that.
The idea looked so inspiring that investors endowed startups which did not have anything except for a beautiful site, White Paper, fire in the eyes and promises to change the world with millions of dollars without thinking.
Of course, this time did not last long and the enthusiasm was replaced with bitter disappointment. Everybody, from the investors who believed that ICOs in which they had invested would become the second Ethereum or even Bitcoin and make them millionaires, to the developers and project founders themselves, who realised in due course that, in practice, blockchain left much to be desired, turned out to be disillusioned.
One of the sceptics was the founder of Edgeless, Tomas Draksas. In his latest interview published on June, 14th, 2018 he declared that the blockchain technology was too slow, energy-consuming and almost inapplicable to gambling:
“In fact, nowadays it is almost impossible to implement blockchain technology in the whole gambling industry, because Ethereum is still a young technology which handles only 15 transactions per second (as an example, Visa processes 45000) and it uses 35 times more energy than traditional server-based technology”.
This opinion has a right to exist, and all would be normal, if Thomas had not criticised FunFair, which is often compared with Edgeless. This has generated a hot discussion on Reddit.
What Jez and Tomas argued about
In short, Tomas Draksas wrote that he did not consider FunFair a competitor of Edgeless because it offered a solution for gambling that was not applicable in practice. In response the FunFair co-founder Jez San said that the founder of Edgeless simply did not understand the essence of the technology offered by FunFair and in turn criticised his competitor for not having created a working casino on blockchain in two years, having developed only three unpretentious games and giving up on the idea of creating a casino on blockchain.
“I used to think Edgeless would amount to something. They did a token sale before FunFair. Raised more eth than FunFair. Showed their first product earlier. Had all this potential. And then blew it. And did nothing with it. Its actually very disappointing how they’ve squandered their opportunity”.
He writes that in spite of the fact that Edgeless already has a working casino on blockchain and FunFair’s development is still at the beta-testing stage, Edgeless is invariably below FunFair in the Ethereum charts:
“Its also somewhat surprising when you take a look at the casino gaming charts on dappradar. Edgeless is often below FunFair in the charts, and this should NOT be possible. FunFair isn’t even live yet!! How can it possibly beat Edgeless in the charts!? If Edgeless had any clue what they’re doing they should be dominating the charts. Not just the casino gaming chart. They should be dominating the entire Ethereum charts“.
So, what have we here?
We have two industry leaders, recognised by the cryptocommunity, the top developers of casinos on the Ethereum blockchain. One of them has a ready product which does not seem to be very popular among the players, therefore now he is almost ready to refuse the idea of making the gambling industry open and fair by means of blockchain. The second one does not have a ready product but is full of enthusiasm.
Not a very optimistic picture.
When I spoke to the FairWin lead developer, Sergey Bolshakov and asked him what he thought about it, he told me this:
“Honestly, this is not so interesting to me and is none of my business. In my opinion, FunFair and Edgeless can not be considered competitors. Owing to the features of the technology, casinos on blockchain now cannot compete with the centralised online casinos. Therefore, nobody can compete for the market of gambling.
It was possible to consider them competitors one year ago, but it was a competition of another kind, then it was important for them to get the community to trust the idea. Now both projects occupy their own niches, they are the talk of the crypto community. What will happen next — time will tell. But I think that the best solution for gambling is still ahead”.
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