The recent 69 million dollar sale of a single piece of digital artwork at Christie’s Auction House hit the finance and art world by surprise. It also brought about renewed interest in the many uses of this wild form of verification we call the blockchain.
The buyer doesn’t own the piece in the traditional physical form. Instead, they possess proof of purchase in the form of an NFT.
What do NFTs, the blockchain, and cryptocurrency have to do with online gambling? Let’s take a look at the direction the digital future is moving.
News Highlights
- NFTs gain steam with high-profile sales
- Uses of blockchain technology expand
- Crypto gambling’s advantages become apparent
NFTs Selling for Millions Recently
NFT stands for non-fungible token. A non-fungible asset is something like your house, an antique, or a work of art. It’s unique nd is only worth what someone will pay you for it.
In contrast, fungible assets are units that people can readily exchange. Money is the most common fungible asset we have. With cash, you can swap two $5 bills for $10 and have the same value.
An NFT is a unique, tradeable token that acts as a digital receipt to prove ownership of something. That’s what is catching the attention of artists such as Beeple, the creator of the $69-million Christie’s work.
The NFT hype has spread into music, trading cards, sports collectibles, photos, gifs, and much more. Famous figures such as Grimes, Linkin Park, and LeBron James have all sold them. Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter sold an NFT of the first tweet ever published for $2.9 million dollars.
The History of NFT Based Gaming
NFTs started on a smaller scale than the Beeple piece or LeBron’s multimillion-dollar sales of his basketball “moments” through NBA Top Shots.
In 2015, the first true NFT was 457 Etheria hexagons that formed a map. A couple of years later, in 2017, Larva Labs launched an online digital-image trading market called CryptoPunks on the Ethereum blockchain. Later that same year, CryptoKitties came out, and people could buy, sell, and breed unique cartoon images of cats in a type of game.
Now there are dozens of games in cyberspace where NFTs attached to some character can be bought, sold, or earned. With all the recent hype, people began paying thousands for tiny pixelated faces, digital cats, gifs. Even those Etheria hexagons that went mostly unsold for six years started to sell recently.
OK, What’s a Blockchain?
A blockchain is a public ledger of transactions that get verified by multiple computers. The name comes from the stored database structure, where individual records, called blocks, get linked in a list one after another, called a chain. This technology is the backbone of Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency.
To say that a blockchain is public means the users run it, and anyone can view it. That, paired with transparency and security, makes blockchain technology extremely secure. It is also why cryptocurrencies are gaining popularity as forms of online payment.
Today, these databases track and verify digital currencies, NFTs, shipping and distribution, healthcare records, and even online gambling.
Transparent Transaction Ledger
A blockchain is decentralized, meaning that no one entity runs it. All computers connected to a system help maintain the blockchain, so it is purely a peer-to-peer form of transacting.
Anyone can view the transaction log, and if you know how to read it, you can find any purchase. However, it is intricately coded, making it extra hard to hack, forge, or duplicate.
Future of Crypto Gambling with Levels of Provable Fairness
The future of blockchain tech is hard to pinpoint. NFTs are some of the newest blockchain tech uses, and people see the recent surge in sales as a bubble. It’s clear, though, that more and more establishments are jumping on board to confirm transactions in some form.
Companies such as Walmart, Ford, Pfizer, and various financial services institutions have begun using blockchain technology.
One of the elements of blockchain technology is developers’ ability to program open-source “smart contracts.” These contracts are enabling someone to verify and track various parts of an online gambling bet. That translates to provably fair games for online gamblers.
New Found Credibility for Online Casinos
Crypto gambling sites have used smart contracts in digital for nearly a decade. Many of the top online casinos that accept conventional money and cryptocurrency have started using provably fair games for their digital currency customers.
Companies like CryptoGambling.org aim to bring transparency to every dice rolled and dealt hand. Imagine all logged-in computers at a site verifying the casino algorithm’s fairness and making a public ledger of each spin of the slot reels. That could provide a level of credibility never seen before.
