As a former investment banker now “leading the de-fi revolution in iGaming”, we caught up with Bitblox CEO, Brandt Page, to discuss how a background in finance has shaped his outlook on the online betting space, how he sees the rise of web3 and decentralised finance impacting the industry in future and how his company is providing a totally new kind of entertainment to players.
As the CEO of Bitblox, one of the things I often get asked is how did a guy with a background in accounting wind up running a crypto-based price predictions company in the iGaming sphere – but believe it or not, there’s probably more overlap between the two sectors than you might think.
While its true that I started out on the traditional side of things studying accounting and going on to work for Australia’s largest investment bank, Macquarie, for 15 years, after that I took a CFO role at a business that was very early to AI and machine learning called Stratagem Technologies.
At the time, Stratagem had literally just applied it’s technology stack to sports betting, so that was the point where my accounting skills crossed over into the gaming and gambling side of things. It was also there that I met the pre-founders of what would become Bitblox in a project called the Hrxo Network in about 2019, which first sparked my interest in the world of decentralised finance.
When we look at de-fi, what we’re effectively talking about here with the blockchain technology is a ledger. It records transactions and it’s immutable, so it can’t be altered afterwards. That’s obviously very similar to accounting, as if I do a journal as an accountant and I need to change it, I can’t just erase it – instead I need to do another journal to reverse whatever it is I’ve done before.
Obviously the whole aim of de-fi is to remove the need for middlemen, as if I send you something, you know it’s going to arrive because of the permissionless rules that exist within the transaction – and I think that’s something that’s going to be increasingly important in future. It perhaps hasn’t moved as fast as we would have hoped just yet, but I do think it will have a big impact on iGaming and other sectors moving forward, as will the other main aspects associated with web3 as well.
We already know web3 is coming to iGaming. We’ve seen the rise of crypto casinos over the last five years and I think as de-fi gets faster and faster – which is what we really need for it to work at scale in the iGaming world – we’ll see the continued rise of de-fi related content. We’re at the forefront of that at Bitblox, but we’re playing things slightly differently as our USP is about bringing crypto-based betting to customers, rather than just enabling them to wager in Bitcoin and USDC.
Primarily, what we’re trying to do is turn the Bitcoin market into something fun and provide a form of entertainment for players. We’re not creating a product where they need to sit trading for long periods of time and use leverage if they want to do something – we’re literally offering a 20-second prediction on where the price of Bitcoin is going. As that’s a real-life thing and the Bitcoin market is – by nature – very volatile, I think that intuitively makes it an exciting prospect for bettors.
Of course, our aim is to disrupt the iGaming space a little, but for me, a big part of that is to bring the experience I’ve gained from other sectors into this part of the market and create something new. I think as we release more and more content, that’s when we’ll start to see whether Bitblox truly becomes a mainstream product for operators, but as we’re providing a mix of games of chance and games of skill rather than relying on RNG, there’s definitely a niche that we’re filling.
In the meantime, I think it’s fair to say that most sectors have now realised web3 and de-fi aren’t going away. The fact we’ve seen the rise of exchange-traded funds around Bitcoin and Ethereum shows that the traditional financial markets are already clued-in to their potential and having that vote of confidence will only serve to help other industries embrace them at greater pace in future.
As far a regulatory side of things goes, only time will tell – but the institutions responsible for putting this framework in place are already looking at cryptocurrencies and how they can govern them more efficiently and I’m sure the same will apply for de-fi projects in the iGaming space too.
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