The Wolf Of All Streets - Bitcoin Will Skyrocket, But Crypto Casinos Are The Next Big Thing! | Nigel Eccles

Episode Date: December 15, 2024

Join me on The Wolf Of All Streets as I sit down chat with Nigel Eccles, the visionary founder of FanDuel, now taking his expertise to the crypto space. Learn how his battle with regulators in the fantasy sports industry is shaping his innovative crypto casino, BetHog. From political prediction markets to building social gaming experiences with blockchain, this conversation is packed with insights, controversies, and the future of crypto gambling. Don't miss it! Nigel Eccles: https://x.com/nigeleccles ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/   ►► Arch Public Unleash algorithmic trading. Discover how algorithms used by hedge-funds are now accessible to traders looking for unparalleled insights and opportunities!  👉https://archpublic.com/  ►►TRADING ALPHA READY TO TRADE LIKE THE PROS? THE BEST TRADERS IN CRYPTO ARE RELYING ON THESE INDICATORS TO MAKE TRADES. Use code '10OFF' for a 10% discount. 👉https://tradingalpha.io/?via=scottmelker  Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://x.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.com/ Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe   Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c   #Bitcoin #Crypto #investments  Timecodes 0:00 Intro 3:00 Challenges with Regulators 6:00 Crypto vs. Traditional Payments 11:00 Building a Crypto Casino 13:30 Social and Interactive Gaming 16:00 Geoblocking and Regulations 20:00 Crypto as a Payment Rail 23:00 Meme Coins as Gambling Tools 27:00 Meme Coins vs. NFTs 30:00 Barriers in Crypto Adoption 37:00 Challenges with Web3 Innovation 43:00 Launching BetHog The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

Online gambling, however, is not social. It's a very transactional experience. It's a very solo experience. If the streamers play in this game, why can't I be part of it? Why can't I buy into it? Why can't I play? Crypto is much better than credit card, right? Like, credit card, somebody could be betting on money they don't have. Polymarket absolutely exploded with its political predictive markets,

but they were not the first people to do it. Today's guest, Nigel Eccles, founded a platform doing exactly that and then transitioned it into FanDuel, which became the largest daily fantasy sports site in the world. Well, now he's with us in crypto and is building a crypto-based casino. You guys don't want to miss this conversation, all the lessons that he learned from going up against legislators and regulators in the gambling industry that he's now bringing to crypto. I want to start the conversation with something from your history, which is Hubdub, because political prediction markets exploded during this last election cycle. Obviously,

PolyMarket became a mainstream name. It's a crypto-native political prediction market site. A lot of people pointed to it as having either influence or being more accurate for the election results. And of course, their CEO's house was raided by the FBI immediately after the election. You had this idea 20 years ago. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. We launched Hubdub, which is a prediction market we created in 2008, started 2008. An incredible year, 2008, just, you know, because of the election market. Obviously, that was the year in which Obama sort of swept it. And it was great. And it was lots of engagement. The media loved it then, as they did today. The challenge we found, kind of the reason FanDuel exists today is because prediction markets are, I kind of joke, it's a bit like the Christmas tree market.

It's amazing in December, not so good in January. And that's the problem with prediction markets is that people love them for elections, but the next news story is just not nearly as important. And so off years are really bad. And so what we found is as soon as election happened, interest really dropped off. And so in early 2009, we pivoted to become Fando. It's incredible that a political prediction market site became effectively the world-leading fantasy site for fantasy football, right? And so, I mean, talk about the early days of Fando, I guess, a bit.

Yeah, they're both games of prediction. fantasy football, right? And so, I mean, talk about the early days of FanDuel, I guess, a bit. Yeah. They're both, you know, they're both games of prediction. And so they have that sort of common root to it. You know, the early days of FanDuel, well, you know, FabDev was the star. Summer 29, or 2009, we launched FanDuel with, we basically sort of went back to first principles and said, okay, this team are really good at building these sort of prediction games, but, you know,

we need something where there's a real demand all year round, every year. When we looked at fantasy, we said, okay, this is a really interesting market, but there's something like 20, 25 million people play it. But the games are very slow, take a long time. You know, you start in September and you play all the way through to like December. You can't start during the start of the season you have to have nine or ten friends to play with it's kind of a at the time you couldn't play on your phone and so we sort of said well what if we could make it a lot faster and we could um uh give real cash prizes and make

it a mobile experience and so that was the original product. And, you know, we launched that in 2009. And then every year, we really kind of scaled that business to like 5x, 3 to 5x year-on-year growth. And so we went from standing star to by about 2015, we were doing something like $150 million in revenue. And so you had some unique challenges at FanDuel that my crypto listeners, which is all of my listeners, may find sort of, you know, in line with things that we've seen in this industry. Obviously, you guys had the very largely publicized attempted merger with DraftKings. It was blocked by the FTC.

Crypto people and anyone trying to be in tech in the last four years in this country knows how difficult it's been to do any sort of merger and acquisition. You went through that entire process. You were steering the ship as the CEO. I mean, interesting experience. So the sort of the precursor to that were the issues that we had in 2015, 2016, when we had something that's very, very similar to what's happening in crypto. So number one, we had a fairly concerted media attack on the industry.

So New York Times in particular, but a bunch of other publications suddenly decided, this is terrible, this should not be allowed. And this is clearly illegal gambling, which it wasn't. And clearly we were, you know, defrauding users and just generally bad people. And so that was a fairly concerted attack. We then had a lot of attorney generals pick up on that thread, mostly, you know, on the on the Democrat side, so again, very like crypto. And they try to kick us out of a bunch of states like Illinois, Texas, New York. And in those states, we end up suing the attorney general, say, look, this is not, we want to go to court.

And we also got investigated by a litany, a litany of, you know, you know, these sort of ABCs of, you know, federal agencies, again, under this idea that this was illegal gambling. And the objective really, I guess, was to try and, you know, kill the industry. And we responded like twofold. One was we fought back. We said, no, if you want to go to court, we'll go to court. We feel good.

This is a game of skill. I like the crypto industry we're doing. But the second thing that we did that the crypto industry hasn't been as successful as doing is we got in front of legislators and said, look, you know, this is, people love playing fantasy sports. And they want, the attorney general in your state wants to shut it down. This is New York, you know, Texas and stuff. We should, you know, we should write law.

And we as companies want, you know, we want to be, we're happy to be regulated. We want consumers to be protected. So let's write laws that protect consumers, but also clarify that this is legal. And we did that. And we actually changed the law. We passed laws in 22 states in two years. So it was really incredible. And I'm actually very positive in crypto that we're doing good on the first one, fighting back. But the second one, which is getting bills through Congress that sort of give the crypto industry a chance to sort of

grow and evolve while protecting consumers. So we's kind of it. So we've been through that process and it worked well. Well, the crypto industry has been in the spotlight even on 60 Minutes this last week for their manipulating of the political process, which I find obviously laughable. Apparently donating to candidates that you like now is manipulating election results, which is exactly how Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, and everybody else on the planet has ever influenced. Yeah, like it's when it's a candidate you do like, it's a contribution. When it's a candidate you don't like, it's manipulation. Yeah, like that's kind of to be expected. You know, crypto is also new.

It's also, you know, sort of. It's also a younger emerging technology. And so you're going to have pushback from the status quo. It's also very disruptive to banking. So banking is highly hostile to crypto because, yeah, it's disruptive to them. So I think we expect that. But it's also, to me, in a way, I actually think crypto should start to become bipartisan because on the right, it's about freedom. Like, you know, like if you're a Republican, you would be like, look, this is about freedom. People should be able to do whatever they want with their money. Why would the government, the government should not be involved in this. But also it's kind of, you know, on the left, which is like, you know, you believe that people should have freedom to choose, you know, what happens to their body or things like that.

Like surely you also believe they should be able to do with their money. And also you should be wary of big banks. You should give people a financial freedom. So I think in effect, in the longer term, it will appeal to both sides. But right now it's obviously getting a lot more embrace on the Republican side. I think at the core, it originally did embrace, was embraced by both sides.

And then it, like everything else, when it became large enough, became a political issue. And you have very loud voices on the left that were very anti. I mean, the irony of like an Elizabeth Warren being the most anti-Big Bank person. I mean, you know, she's in bed with J Morgan and JB Depp, but being anti-big bank, but then also being anti-crypto, which is supposed to be the answer to somebody to opt out of that system. I mean, the irony is the same. The hope I have on the left is that their anti-crypto coalition didn't make any sense. And it died. I don't think it, you know, it was a very small army. And it just didn't, you know, and the smarter people on the left,

like Mark Cuban, like were being vociferous and kind of like, this doesn't make any sense. Like, why would you go to war with, you know, a technology and something that's so popular with a, you know, a sizable segment of the community that's actually not really didn't at the time didn't swing, you know, left or right, or actually had both sides, it seems so stupid. And, you know, hopefully this election, they take that opportunity to go back and say, is this, you know, is this really do we want this to be

our position? And, you know, in 2028, I just don't think think so i can't imagine 2028 one of their big positions is and we're gonna it won't be we're gonna i don't think so so yeah it's the anti-crypto army of one which is elizabeth warren because sherrod brown's gone and gensler's getting out and you know and i think that was just the natural order of things i think it became politically unpalatable to be anti-crypto you don't gain any voters by being anti-crypto right nothing and that's you know and that's you know it's funny like and then we find this in in fantasy sports is to be anti-crypto. You don't gain any voters by being anti-crypto. You don't get any. Right. Nothing. And that's, you know, it's funny. And then we find this in fantasy sports is politicians are very sensitive to two things.

One is money, right? Like they do like, you know, if an industry say, well, we would obviously like to help you campaign. But the other is votes, right? And that's a good thing, right? We want them to be sensitive and say, well, you know, even if somebody is willing to pay them a lot of money, they're like, well, this could cost me a lot of votes.

And votes is more important than money. And so fantasy sports was incredibly popular. That's why we managed to get all those bills through. But so is crypto. And so I just think on both sides, we're going to see, you know, not Warren because she's in such a safe seat. It doesn't matter. But we see so many Democrats embracing it and saying, look, it's popular. Why the hell would I oppose it?

Yeah, I think that the winds have shifted permanently in crypto's favor. There'll be holdouts, but I agree with you. You're obviously a gambler at heart. Right. I mean, you started out political predictions, then moved on to daily fantasy sports. You're a self-proclaimed meme trader. You've got an NFT as your identity and avatar on Twitter. And you're now launching a betting platform or have launched BetHog,

which obviously accepts cryptocurrency, which is where we wanted to eventually arrive here in this conversation. So talk about what you're building. And then I guess we'll get more deeply into why crypto is integrated into that. Yeah. So we're building like a crypto casino platform. And we're very focused on creating original content, original games. One of our big, one of our big things that I've looked at in the last year or so was just kind of, I thought it was very interesting that, I think it was two things.

One was that offline, and I've thought this for a long time, offline gaming is a naturally social experience, right? It's, you know, you go to Vegas with friends, right? The idea of going to, certainly for me, going to Vegas on my own is like a horrific experience. I've done it because I work in the industry and it's no fun. Like, it's like, you know, you go there, it's the loneliest place in the world. It's a very social experience.

That's when gambling is the most fun. Online gambling, however, is not social. It's a very transactional experience. It's a very transactional experience. It's a very solo experience. And one of the interesting phenomenas we've seen is that streaming has actually interjected a layer into gambling. So that's people on Twitch, on Kik, streaming, hanging out with people that watch them. And it's very social.

But the interesting thing is that the games themselves haven't changed. So the games that people are playing on Twitch, on Kik, are the typical five real slot game. So that doesn't really make any sense to me. It's like, wow, why aren't the games built for this format? And one way in which we would want to build it is actually make it much more interactive. Like if the streamers play in this game, why can't I be part of it? Why can't I buy into it? Why can't I play? And so none of the games at the moment allowed us to do that. And that's what we're doing is we're investing in building titles that are more social and actually work much better for streamers, which is one of the biggest channels for crypto casinos right now.

And so is it only going to be crypto deposits? So it'll be only crypto deposits. So we take deposits in Bitcoin, Ethereum, USDT, and Solana. You deposit, you hold it in those currencies because obviously people want that exposure. We will add to that as we get more demand from other tokens. I think in time, we're going to allow people to buy crypto and then deposit in the platform. But as an operator operating in time, we're going to allow people to buy crypto and then deposit in the platform. But as an operator, operating in crypto is an amazing experience.

So even like today, I was looking at it. DraftKings, which I think will do about $4 billion in revenue this year, will spend $500 million on payments. Earlier this year, Fandil said that they were spending 12.5% of revenue on payments. It's a nightmare as an operator because you've got the credit card companies taking at least 3%, sometimes taking more. You also are totally beholden to them. Also things like chargebacks. If somebody comes in, loses a lot of money, next day says, you know what, I don't want to pay for that. They go to their credit card.

And next thing you're actually having to challenge that, even though that clearly was that user, the credit card wasn't stolen. That's kind of the life of the operator. And it's really, really challenging. So crypto absolutely takes out all of those middlemen and allows the user to directly interact with the operator and takes out all of those costs. Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And I think can be applied to a lot of industries anywhere where there's payments, anywhere there's a third party in between. Yeah, this isn't just for gambling in that case. Yeah, exactly. And it's actually, it's one, I would argue,

it's probably one of the biggest areas of success for crypto, but least talked about. It's kind of, it's sort of not as sexy and interesting. Like it's not like this kind of really interesting DeFi protocol. It's literally, you know, the ability for someone to have money and to send that money to a provider. It doesn't, everyone talks about buying coffee with crypto, which is a pretty bad use case, but being able to send $10,000 to somewhere instantly at almost no cost, that's actually where it's really interesting. Being able to send $10 to somebody at almost no cost is also where it's

interesting. You try wiring somebody 10 bucks in Nigeria. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Internationally, you know, yeah.

Without all of the headache, it is, yeah, it's from an operator perspective. You know, I give the example to founder and DraftKings. They're regulated onshore operators. You know, Bedhog is regulated, you know, I give the example to Founder and DraftKings. They're regulated onshore operators. You know, Bedhog is regulated, but offshore.

And we're operating in like 100 different countries, every one of which is different payment infrastructure. And so instead of us having to integrate 100 different payment stacks, we actually just have one, which is crypto. Makes so much sense. So crypto casinos have existed for quite a while, right? And most of them have been offshore. Who will this be available to?

Who will be blocked from using it, at least for now? And what's going to be wildly different about this from the ones that exist? Yeah, so we geo-block the US, most of Western Europe. And so the areas we're focused on is Asia, Latin America. We also operate in Canada. The differences here is if you look at a lot of those casinos, the games look all the same.

And the reason they look the same is because they are the same. Basically, most casinos or nearly all casinos use aggregators. They work with aggregators that bring in games from like 100 different providers. And then, you know, so you'll have pragmatic evolution. These are all these third-party providers. And so the games actually aren't that different. I mean, the casinos themselves are exactly the same. They basically buy their products from a third party, the same ones. With us, we're much more focused on building original games and content so that the user can just basically, you know, will play the games

with us because we're the only ones that carry it. And so we have some titles like Hogger, which is a unique game that can only be played on our site. You can't play it anywhere else. So that's where you're going to see a lot of investment in original titles. That's really, really interesting. What I find more interesting, though, is who you've had to geo-block and why. So for those who don't know, why would you have to block the United States and Western Europe for now? And then I want to get into whether you think that could change with administrative change in the United States.

Well, so it's not for the normal reasons in crypto. For normal reasons in crypto, in crypto normally you block the OFAC countries. That's like, you know, North Korea, Iran, Russia. And you ban the US because it's got a highly litigious and the current administration overreaching. That I think changes changes broadly for crypto. For gaming, the reason you block the U.S. is the U.S. has got a regulated market and laws that means that offshore providers cannot provide games to people in the U.S. That won't change with the administration.

The only way for us or anyone offshore operator to come on shore would be come and get regulated in new jersey pennsylvania illinois that is something that we definitely would love to do at some point but it's it's you know at least probably three to five years out we're about to get though arguably more sensible regulation uh things should free up for innovators but is it just that it's gambling and it's crypto together and so how much can you really hope for in the next year or two so we're not well it's different from the normal regulation that you see in crypto which is the issue and crypto does need that but you know so for example for us to come on shore let's just say new jersey which is probably one of the easiest states to come into in that there's available licenses, there's clear rules.

And it's not it's not artificially restrictive like some other states say, well, you can only operate if you have a casino in this state. Obviously, that's very restrictive. New Jersey is more open, but we would need them to accept that we could take crypto instead of just taking fiat. At the moment, no regulator in the US allows existing operators to take deposits in crypto. So which is, you know, obviously crazy, right? It's like, you know, there's like $4 trillion in this asset that, you know, like a huge adoption of this. And they're like, no, you have to use credit card. You have to use, you know, bank transfer. And actually, it's interesting.

Crypto is much better than credit card, right? Like credit card, somebody could be betting on money they don't have. In crypto, no one's sending you money that they don't have. By definition, they have it. Our view is this technology is better. The regulators should be more open to this. But it's just going to take some time. Will you eventually have crypto trading, do you think, as part of the platform?

Definitely would be interested. I think there's obviously a very high overlap between people who like consumer-type products and people who like to speculate. So, yeah, we've, in fact, I've been chatting to a couple of providers that potentially could sort of help us put it on. But, yeah, I think that'd be a cool thing to have on the platform. So how did you fall down this rabbit hole and discover crypto as sort of the solution to these problems? Yeah, I originally got into crypto in 2017. Like my background is I've been a consumer entrepreneur since about 2000.

I started, joined my first startup in 2000, started my first company in 2007. In 2017, I sort of learned about particularly Ethereum. Like I knew about Bitcoin before, but to me, and even to this day, I find Bitcoin a little boring. I'm like, oh, great, I'd buy it and it goes up. Great. That's good.

But I didn't find it interesting. I found the white paper really interesting. I thought it was a really fascinating technical solution to the double spend problem. But I couldn't build on it. I didn't see there was obvious products that you could extend from it. I still think it's brilliant, but intellectually, I was like, okay, great. But Ethereum, I felt was fascinating, though, because it clearly was a world computer. It was a platform you could build products on. But in 2017, when I first got into it,

I just realized it was not ready. It wasn't ready for us to build consumer applications. Arguably, the first consumer application would have been something like CryptoKitties, which I thought was really cool, but just almost impossible to buy, like very, very difficult to buy, very difficult to sell. So after the first sort of playing around with it, I didn't really spend much time on it until 2020. And then actually it was NFTs that got me back into it. And I'm like, okay, you know, these are, this is much better. You can actually buy them on a credit card. That's what got me back into the space. And since then I've been 100% focused on crypto.

Yeah. I mean, you've obviously fallen down the rabbit hole if you're describing yourself, as I said, as a meme coin trader and you have an NFT avatar. So let's talk about meme coins. What do you make of this more recent meme coin trend? We obviously had the first iteration with Doge and then the dog coins going crazy in the last cycle at the same time as NFTs. Now we have, let's call it an explosion, millions of coins being launched on a daily basis, pump.fund. How do you approach that market and how do you view it? Yeah, I think it's really fascinating. As somebody who, and I follow meme coins quite closely and try to stay close to it.

The thing that is often a mistake is when you see a new innovation, you go, oh, it's just a toy. It's trivial. It's not serious use of this technology. That's nearly always a mistake because new innovations often look like toys and they become huge success stories. The second thing is, in consumer, the hardest thing to get is attention. And there's so many products that are built every year that get no attention and then fail and die. Meme coins have got ridiculous attention. And I've never seen a consumer product as quickly just like generate such attention.

You know, someone can launch a meme coin within 24 hours. It has tens of thousands of owners and, you know, just tons of attention on it. There's a number of ways I look at meme coins. I look at it as thinking, well, maybe this is the first version of an even more interesting technology. You know, maybe, you know, we're seeing the first, you know, you know, the first instance of it as it gets more interesting and more complex. And then the other way I look at it, it's kind of the opposite. I think of it as, this is probably one of the best gambling products I've ever seen invented.

You know, looking at it purely as, you know, somebody who's been in the gaming industry for 20 years. Here we have a betting product. We've compared it with sports betting or casino or, you know, lottery. Here's a product where someone could have a 10,000x return. Number one, that's good. Number two, EV or expected value. So if I go into the casino, my expected value of most games is about minus 3%. Sports betting, it's about minus 7%. If I'm playing parlays, it's minus 20%. For meme coins, I have no idea what it is. It might be positive, right? You know, and it all depends when the market is. So that's another one.

It's like, okay, potentially positive, which means that it also, and some of the things I, thirdly, I think is potentially a game of skill, right? Or it almost certainly is a game of skill. There's definitely edge. I mean, the on-chain guys who understand when things are launching and are on top of that market certainly are going to destroy retail for better for worse and that becomes really interesting we see if some of the biggest booms in betting products

they're typically games of skill like a poker boom from 2003 till i don't know like 2015 like that sort of era 2014 like, like just incredible boom. Daily Fantasy Sports, game of skill, incredible boom. Meme coins, I think similar you're seeing, it's a game of skill, it's potentially EV positive, which is even more crazy when giving these sort of life-changing types of returns. So that as a betting product, I think it's perfect in itself. Oh, and then the last thing I'd mention on it is I've never seen a product create so much content around itself,

right? So it creates community and content, which no betting product in history really has ever done it in the same way. That just like somebody launches a coin and then suddenly people are jumping on it and suddenly all of this content is getting created and it's creating its own marketing. And everyone who buys into it has an incentive for everyone else to buy into it. So they're promoting it. Again, that doesn't really happen in any other betting product. So, you know, so that's the thing is, and sometimes I look at it and think this maybe is the most perfect betting product I've ever seen. And then sometimes I look at it and go, maybe there's just an early iteration of something bigger. And I don't know which one it is. I'm curious what that something bigger could be. A lot of the things you just described actually are reminiscent of how a

lot of people would have described the NFT cycle before. Right. Yeah. A different version, but same concept. You built this quick community. There was something for them to rally around. There was a hugely speculative aspect about it. It could also do 10,000 Xs and before, but for some reason they didn't stick in the same way. I think meme coins are a better version of NFT projects, of community-based NFT projects, the ones we were trading in 21. I think they're purer and they're more honest.

Like in 21, we have people like- I was just going to say, they're more honest. You don't pretend it's some membership to the most hoity-toity club on the planet. You know exactly what you're getting. Also, they're also, in their best form, are more decentralized in that, you know, NFT projects, they had this, like we just saw Artifact shutting down. After generating $300 million in revenue, did nothing for two years, and then they just shut it down. And you're like, okay, we don't want to go back to that.

With meme coins, for all their feelings, that's not happening. The money is not all accruing to some central entity who's going to do nothing for two years and then just say, actually, we're all good. We're retiring to our second homes in the Mediterranean. So I just think they're purer and more honest. Lots of issues with them,

but I think they're a better form of NFT. It's interesting you have this sort of barbell. You got like you're creating a company with crypto I think they're a better form of NFT. It's interesting you have this sort of barbell. You got like you're creating a company with crypto because it's a superior payment rail. It's more efficient. It's a better way to do things. And then the other side is like, we're not going to pretend we do anything.

These are purely speculative gambling poker chips that if you play them right, you can make a ton of money on. Where's the in-between right now for crypto? I don't know if there is an in-between. It's a really good question. And I was like, every time I've seen the problem, one of the problems of meme coins is meme coins becoming anything else is so much of their value is memetic value.

It's not utility utility it's just this kind of like belief and it's anytime anyone tries to like try to go yeah and we're going to like deliver value suddenly you introduce reality to its valuation and suddenly you're like you know it's it's kind of like you know the nft days where you paid like 50,000 for this NFT. And then they're like, hey, now you're going to get your utility. Here's a crappy hoodie. And then you're like, oh, you know, the utility is this crappy hoodie. Maybe this NFT is not worth 50,000.

Whereas like that to me is like, and I've seen when I've looked at, you know, projects, like there's projects I know in crypto that are valued, like almost like a value stock, just like incredibly undervalued. And they have no memetic value, right? And then you're like, well, could they, like, would memetic value help them? And I'm not sure if they will. I just, I don't know if it's, you know, we've either go to like it's utility. It's just purely based on, you know, like the financial analysts could look at their cash flows and stuff. And then there's the ones on the other end, which are these memetic value. There's no way to value them. And there doesn't seem to be, the middle ground is a bit of a wasteland. Do you have a concept for which crypto people are most likely to use on your platform? I would

imagine that even though you're going to accept, I think, Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, stable coins, I saw, I would venture that people are less likely to part with their Bitcoin for gambling than they would with perhaps Solana, because maybe people who are in Solana are used to trading meme coins? Yeah, it's a good question. It's still very early for us to draw conclusions. And I'm quite aligned with Solana. And so I think that's driven most of our deposits. And some of our games only work in Solana.

And so the biggest one we're getting at the moment is Solana. Historically, with crypto casinos, actually, Bitcoin has been one of the biggest one we're getting at the moment is Solana. Historically with crypto casinos, actually, Bitcoin has been one of the biggest. So if you look at stake.com or some of the big operators, yes, Bitcoin would be one of their biggest ones just because it's the most valuable one. But I think Solana is one of the fastest growing as people adopt it. The other thing I would say is that there surprisingly isn't much overlap between, say, the crypto community, like crypto Twitter, and the casino vertical. It's almost seemed like they're just two. They use the same technology, but they don't really look at each other.

I would argue that stake.com is probably the most successful crypto consumer app today. Like, they will do, they've already done over 12 billion in deposits and probably like four, you know, three or four billion in revenue. And how often do you see that on crypto Twitter? Like, never.

You never see them mentioned unless it's like one of their rare kind of sponsorship deals. But you see them on F1 cars. Yeah, if they're sponsored or they get hacked, like that will get mentioned. But it's a totally different like demo. Why do you think that is? Because you would think that crypto Twitter is largely, you know, a self-proclaimed DJing crowd that's flipping meme coins around. I'm not talking, I think there's bifurcations. There's guys who have millions of followers with memes I've never seen. I have millions of followers for a podcast. They've never seen me. There's

NFT influencers I've never heard of. I think we do. It's not just one thing anymore. Yeah. You would think that if they're doing, you know, tens of billions in deposits, that would be a pretty frequent. I think one of the reasons is that most people in crypto or crypto Twitter view their crypto activity as EV positive activity. They don't view it as entertainment, bizarrely, even though they could probably lose money on some of them are. But like they view it as, you know, so they think of themselves more like a poker player than they think of themselves as like a slots player. And so stake is just not interesting because, um, you know, nearly all of the games are, all of the games on stake are EV negative, right? They're, you know, if you go and

play it, you expect to have less money than when you started. And I think that certainly in crypto Twitter, it's full of people who all think they're smarter than the next person. And so they have no interest in that product. Player versus player, not player versus casino. Correct. That's right. If they're like, oh, it's a standard 1% takeout, then they're like, well, I can't make money on that. So why is that interesting? That makes a lot of sense, but I'm still surprised that there's that much money out there being deposited in crypto and it's that quiet. That's right.

It just shows you how many absolute monster whales there are out there in the world that are not part of the public community, which shouldn't surprise you, I guess. Well, yeah, it is. Even within the way I think about it, it is still really surprising. This should be absolutely a poster child of like,

this is what crypto can do in that it solves a massive problem, which is payments. And here's a really good example of one that is very successful. I mean, Polymarket got all of the attention and that was simply because you could just do it in crypto and became this killer crypto app. And that's not coming, not even a drop in the

bucket versus what Stake's doing. The thing about, and Polymarket did a great job and that team is really executing, but in a lot of ways, they didn't really do anything new. Like prediction markets have been around for about 20 years. What they did is said, we're going to take crypto. And suddenly it became really easy to fund it. And that's when it's, you know, that's when it just kind of like turned into a rocket ship. I mean, I, listen, you had Hubdub, you were probably just too early. I mean, that's the answer.

It's like, I mean, you know, Uber type apps existed before iPhones didn't work very well until people bought iPhones. Yeah, like with Hubdub, we launched before even Bitcoin launched. So like we had no way of, you know, we just couldn't have taken money. Yeah, that's a really big issue that, you know, you see with Polymarket, but we've seen a mistake is that

because they can take money, you can build really big businesses. Are you, having been here since about 2017, I think I started in crypto in 2016. I'm far from an OG. Are you surprised at how far it's come in this amount of time? It seems we've seen it just on a rocket ship of late, obviously, fueled by the election and regime change and ETFs and all of these things. But sometimes I do pinch myself and say, like, why am I seeing a Bitcoin, Ethereum

and Solana ticker on CNBC? Right. Yeah. I guess I'm a little surprised how far it's come, but I'm also surprised how far it hasn't come, right? Like it just, it feels to me that crypto has continued to fail major narratives, right? Like, you know, even to go back to the start, like Bitcoin was supposed to be cash. Like we were supposed to be paying people in Bitcoin and we just don't. It was supposed to be used for remittances. It really isn't.

Like USDT is being used for remittances. Tron is being used for remittances. It was supposed to be, you know, companies are supposed to put in their treasuries and outside of, you know, microstrategy, like almost none are doing it. And it's, I think it's ended its final narrative, which is it's digital gold. And I think that one, it will pass on. It is in effect, but to me, digital gold is kind of like when you feel everything else and you still have lots of value, you're digital gold, right? You just sort of like, we, yeah, well, it doesn't really do anything, but it stores value. Great.

That's digital gold when i look at um beyond bitcoin and i look at the 2021 narratives like you know they think about them nfts we were going to revolutionize online clubs we were going to have you know web three games we were going to have you know it was metaverse nothing none bigger than the metaverse come on we were running around with no legs buying $2 million mansions next to Snoop dog in the, in the sandbox or whatever. And yeah. Yeah. And, and, and we feel all of those like web three games today, virtually non-existent, like the, you know, one of the crazy stat that I saw recently is the biggest, you know,

one of the biggest games today in Web3 gaming by MAU is Axie Infinity. Still. Still, right? And so that's kind of stunning to me. We don't, you know, wallets are still incredibly hard to use. Like I was helping somebody,

a friend of mine is an airline pilot,, I was helping somebody, a friend of mine is a, is an airline pilot and I was helping him stake some Solana and he has crypto. He's bought it, you know, no problem. He's even putting it in a wallet. And I'm like, like, and I ended up saying to him, look, it's easy. And he said, that's like me saying it's easy to fly a Boeing. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that's, uh, that's fair. And then I had to walk him through it. And I'm like, okay, yeah, that's fair. And I had a walk-in through it. And I'm like, why is this stuff so hard in 2024? Still, yeah.

Still, right? Like, why? Like, even a simple one with wallets that I find insane is that we expect a user to be able to set up a self-custody wallet that distinguishes between a wallet, like having like 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks in your wallet, and your entire life savings. Bank accounts. Yeah, bank accounts, right? And things that are really protected. And the wallet treats them exactly the same. And like, yes, oh, you go get a ledger, and then you have to go figure all that out. I just don't understand why wallets are not like more siloed. So like there's one wallet, which is, this is a wallet. You know, if you lose your money, then it's like, it's not a big deal.

Here's another thing, which is we don't call a wallet. It's a safety deposit box, man. You know, like, yeah. It's a vault. And we don't let the vault interact with the wider world. We only let it maybe interact with, you know, the vault interact with your wallet, not with the wider wider world because it has to be kept totally safe and we don't let you as a user go and do stupid things with the wall of the vault so that to me and i just don't understand we haven't

designed those in the last three four years because it all seems possible to me but you know that's so and then just lots of other infrastructure stuff that particularly in the theory ecosystem, I just see more infra on infra on infra. And I just, I'm like, who's going to use all of this stuff? Like, I just am like, what about having better wallets, having easier like money transfer? Like these are things that, you know, users are going to care about. The infra on infra on infra just kills me that I just. So you're not a big fan of a layer ones, 2s, 3s, 7s, 12s, 47s.

I guess that's probably why you like Solana. Yeah, so I like Solana. In 2021, there was no alternative, right? Like there was like, if you wanted to build consumer applications, you built it on Solana. I'd say today you can now build on L2s. And I do think it's weird. And the best L2

is Base. It's the one that's got the most consumer adoption. I do think it's absolutely bizarre that if you're building on Ethereum, the best option is to build on a completely centralized option, which is Base. Or not completely centralized, but as centralized as you can get. I think that's weird.

I think it's still too early to say whether the L2 approach is a mistake or not. What I don't think with L2s is we're not going to have thousands of L2s. I think we're going to have two or three. And I think they're going to be fairly dominant. And I think each one of those is going to have thousands of L2s. I think we're going to have two or three. And I think they're going to be fairly dominant. And I think each one of those is going to act in their own economic interest, and they're not going to interoperate with the other L2s. I think that's the fantasy,

that we're going to have a thousand L2s, and they're all going to play nice with each other. That's not going to happen. Just on basic, like, if I build an L2 and I'm dominant, I don't want to want to play with those other guys. And then if I'm the small guy, I want to play with the big guys. But, you know, that's, I just don't see that happening. It's still capitalism. Yeah, it's still capitalism. And we actually see it today.

It's like, oh, base is increasing its dominance, right? Like, we're not even seeing like a clear number two in the market. And so, like, I think that's really good for base and i think that's really good for anybody else who becomes a dominant l2 is that good for ethereum i don't know and i i genuinely don't know i'm not jerry's out yeah i think jerry's out i think that it's it's um i to me personally i would find it very difficult to hold much ETH because the future success scenario for me with Ethereum is we have one or two L2s that do really well. What does that mean for Ethereum? I don't know.

Yeah, I think that that's a fair assessment and becoming more consensus that all of this can exist. We don't need this much block space and it can't all work. But I do think that we'll still have to see some success stories. I think we will. I definitely, I'm, you know, personally, I'm excited with MegaEth.

I think that that's potentially interesting. I don't, the only thing is, I will say is that I think it's getting harder and harder to launch a new L2 or L1. I think Solana, when it launched, when it was competing with Ethereum in 2021, 2022, it had a 100x improvement.

It was really hard for Solana to compete because you're saying you have to bridge your assets over here. If you're launching now, particularly as a new L1, like a Monad or a Beretshi, and I'm like, you know, is your argument that you're like 2x better than Solana? Like, I just don't know if anyone cares at that point. It's like, well, I'm going to need like a big step up on what I have today. Because if I go over there, I have none of the infrastructure, you have none of the users. If I'm an application developer, like why would I build there and not build here on Solana? And that's my biggest sort of question mark, which is, I think,

you know, as we've got much later, it's going to be so much harder to compete for, particularly in the consumer side. So quickly before we finish, when are you going to be fully much harder to compete for, particularly on the consumer side. So quickly before we finish, when are you going to be fully launched? You know, what's that rollout going to look like? And what are your expectations? I guess, what are you most excited for after that happens? Yeah, so we launched the product.

It's in the beta. It's like a public beta last month. We had a strong launch. We are really kind of rapidly we're launching a new game about one a month or one every two months um so we've got a quite rapid development we're doing a lot of building around the you know sort of the vip scheme and um and just moving improving the user experience and so that's all happening uh concurrently at the moment. The thing I'm most excited about is the new games that we launch,

particularly ones that are social. We also have some titles that are PvP. So there are ones that if you're skillful, you could win at them. So we're really interested in seeing those. And we really want next year to be about just launching new titles and getting traction with them and seeing people get excited about them and continue to improve them. So it sounds like the regulatory environment in the United States and all these changes really shouldn't affect you so dramatically. I mean, you're building a business.

There's existing models for it. This is a better way to do it. So you're just going to compete by creating a better product. That's right. Yeah. No, the change to the regular environment, I think, is sort of generally welcome. But it doesn't really affect our sort of day-to-day business. I think that's really interesting because that's not what you generally hear from people who are building in crypto these days. Yeah. Like one thing it does is it and with price inflation, what you do is you get more people onto it. And so it's easy for us to convert users and those users have more money. So that's good. They have the wealth effect or the wealth effect of the money they've made in crypto. And

what am I going to do with this stuff? The same reason that like you see Bitcoin blow up and then when it gets boring, all of a sudden all the other coins start to explode. It's the same reason you see that same cycle. It's the same people who are going to come and say, I've got all this extra money. Let's go play some games. That's right. Yeah. So that's definitely true for us as a second order effect.

But yeah, primary, it's kind of on us as a team to get our heads down, focus on building really good titles, listen to your users, continue to optimize them. That's the focus. I can't wait to play some of those games, Nigel. I appreciate it. So where can everybody follow you and keep up with what you're building after this? I'm Nigel Eccles on Twitter. That's N-I-G-E-L E-C-C-L-E-S. And then the product that we're building is BatHog. And you'll see it on Twitter and it's BatHog.com. Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. You've been through like so many

of the horror stories that the crypto industry has seen without actually being in the crypto industry. It's pretty impressive. I hope that if the battle ever comes to you again, you know, you'll be willing to stand up and fight like you did at FanDuel. Thank you. Oh, absolutely. Appreciate it, Nigel. Have a good one.