How to develop and open a successful cryptocurrency casino in 2023?
- Navigator
- Understanding crypto casinos
- Getting started with your crypto casino
- Legal considerations for a crypto casino
- Cryptocurrencies for online gambling
- Development process for a crypto casino
- Maintenance and updates for a crypto casino
- Future trends in crypto casinos
The first-ever cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, was launched only 14 years ago, in January 2009. It took two more years to be spotted and sprung to popularity (and deliver high prices to its coins, which increased per piece from pennies to dollars and from meager dollars to thousands). A progressive gambling community didn’t wait for too long to start a crypto casino and jumped into a crypto train pretty fast — the first Bitcoin casino was opened just three years later, in 2014. Since then, casinos accepting Bitcoin and other cryptos started to grow rapidly, becoming a locomotive of the blockchain industry and promulgating a new era: online crypto gambling.
In this article, we’re considering how to start a cryptocurrency casino because this is an ever-increasing need of the biggest part of online gambling heralds and casino owners.
Understanding crypto casinos
A crypto online gambling establishment is any online venue, which adopted a cryptocurrency gambling principle. In its technological platform, casino cryptocurrency transactional and gaming flows are embedded.
What is a crypto casino?
Crypto currency casinos add the functionality of a decentralized ledger to their transactions. It might be used just for payments taken from gamblers and given to them. Or an entire gaming system might have been built on the blockchain principle in this or that casino.
It is possible to update a crypto online casino to embed this ledger into its platform (if it is flexible enough) or to build a completely new system from scratch (as well as to use a ready-made White Label solution — these already started to appear on the market, provided by a number of new and reputable companies).
Advantages of using blockchain technology in gambling
Casino crypto gaming has a number of vivid pros, which make them increasingly popular among audiences.
Transparency
Once the transaction is made on the blockchain, it can be independently verified in the future and cannot be altered or deleted, not causing alteration or distortion of every single blockchain transaction record made after it. And doing it is quite close to technological impossibility today, given the high level of security of blockchain decentralized networks.
Security
Nobody can hack a crypto wallet, which is used for casino crypto currency gambling or other purposes (not fraudsters, not governments, not the casino itself).
Payout process
Because of the decentralized nature of all cryptos in the world, online casino crypto transactions are made from a wallet to a wallet directly, not involving any intermediary. This is quick, requires only a low fee & falls out of the scope of governmental control (which is good for personal financial anonymity and taxation exemption). Transactions are usually completed within an hour.
Anonymity
Since the very nature of gambling cryptocurrencies presupposes no involvement of personal information in any crypto transaction, there is no practical need in crypto online gambling establishments to ask for their players’ personal, tax, or financial information to allow them to gamble in the first place. They might only do so if they operate in jurisdictions that specifically impose such a necessity on casinos.
Differences between normal online casinos and blockchain casinos
The main difference between casino cryptos & regular gaming venues is that they offer an opportunity to make crypto transactions to refill the balance and withdraw from it. If they embed a blockchain approach to their gambling process (to increase the verifiability of all gambling outcomes), it will also mean such a gambling establishment becomes hundred percent transparent and everyone can verify that game results are not rigged.
Downsides of crypto casinos
Along with the pros, there are several cons of casino trope crypto gambling:
- Complete anonymity paves the way to cyber criminals and terrorists to amass and transfer money uncontrollably amongst all jurisdictions in the world, where cryptos aren’t prohibited
- If blockchain is embedded in the core of a gambling platform for its games, this caps the number of games on such a platform only to those, which support this function, which decreases the number of gamblers and general revenues
- Exceptional volatility of cryptos: today, one coin can cost ten thousand bucks; another day, it can be one dollar or twenty thousand. Thus, decentralized gambling venues must make reserves to compensate for the swings to make sure smooth payment and gaming processes for everyone registered.
Getting started with your crypto casino
When one’s looking at how to start a crypto gambling establishment, at some point, one realizes there isn’t much difference from starting a regular one. The major exception will be the embedding of cryptos and blockchain into the gambling platform (so as to make them supported in gaming, transactional, financial & other workflows).
Conducting research
This is the most important stage when someone decides to develop a crypto casino because it shapes the structure of the entire business operation and structuring. At this stage, one does the research of:
- market, its capacity, limitations & opportunities
- legal, tax, financial, banking & crypto landscapes
- licensing restrictions and details
- preferences of local gamblers
- features and limitations of particular gaming providers for a given market, etc.
Wise research may take anything from weeks to months and, when put on paper, takes hundreds of pages of information, which ought to be transposed into business requirements and technical specifications for a gambling platform and the company’s business structure development.
Obtaining a license
Shortly after one decides to develop a crypto casino from scratch or update an already working business, it becomes obvious that cryptos are not an easy question in terms of licensing. Not all jurisdictions equally support them or even allow them in the first place because of the tax, legal & other limitations & business practices. One should explore such jurisdictions as Malta, the Isle of Man & Curacao (because they are usually considered the easiest and most progressive ones).
Selecting a platform software
This is the hugest technological stage for every gambling crypto establishment. The software can be developed in three ways:
- Based on the existing platform of a gambling establishment (given it provides enough flexibility)
- From scratch
- One of the available While Label solutions is chosen to adapt to one’s business needs.
Each approach has its pros and cons, including time, cost & team required.
Game selection and development
Management of any best crypto casino 2023 perfectly understands that the correct list of games defines the popularity and success of the establishment in the long run. Therefore, it must be one of the cornerstones of market research and reflect the habits of the target audiences based on their geographical location, history, mindset, preferences & other things. Only the correct basis can shape the list of games on a website and create a necessary niche, which ought to become the main focus during the development and operation of any gambling establishment and its mother company.
Table games
Each market has a unique share of table games in the entire market structure of all games that are traditionally presented in any casino accepting Bitcoin or fiat currencies. In the US, for instance, they cover slightly over 25% of all other games & their most vivid instances are baccarat, roulette, craps, poker & blackjack. These would include card games, as is obvious from the list. Sometimes, though, card games are put into a standalone category — and this also must be worked out when a developer elaborates on a crypto casino site map.
Slots
They have always been a popular variety in brick-and-mortar and online gaming establishments. Thus, in the US alone, they take up to 71% of the market (as of 2020). Their market shares are also high in most other markets. Yet, there are markets with a very low share of video slots amongst the attention of gamers. Thus, in Macau, they account for less than 10%, being significantly outrun by baccarat and some other table games in the generated revenue.
Live dealer games
Initially developed as a gaming option for those people who did not believe in the un-rigged nature of the online RNG engines, Live Dealer games today are the self-sufficient wing of fiat-based and crypto casino games. The biggest advantage for casino runners is that such games are not allowed for demo money and once a player joins one of these, they start to get the flow of real money.
Sports betting
The list of sports that a gambling establishment will embed onto its betting list varies significantly across nations and markets. If someone starting a new crypto casino is focused on the creation of a niche product, it makes no sense to add just all types of sports that exist in the world (since there are thousands of them, although only about 30 are officially recognized as individual sports disciplines by the International Olympic Committee).
In India, one might consider adding bets on cricket, for instance. While in Australia — on rugby. In North America, American football, baseball & big tennis are cherished. While ‘traditional’ football (which is called soccer in the US) would be a much more relevant option in Europe and some parts of Asia.
Esports
The best crypto casinos and ones that accept fiat money have long ago developed an alternative to real-world ‘offline’ sports. Esports betting is more fun and sometimes has bigger bet pools because they are more preferred by younger — more progressive — audiences, at which crypto casinos are specifically oriented (because of the inclination of progressive youth toward technical and technological novelties).
The market value of e-sports is estimated to be over $1 billion in 2020, where the Asia-Pacific share takes over 50% of the global numbers. If one really plans to embed e-sports bets in their crypto casino, a significant geo difference in market volumes must be taken into account.
The most popular games in the e-sports field today with the biggest budgets and prize pools include (but are not limited to) Overwatch, League of Legends, CS: GO, Fortnite & Dota 2.
Integrating payment systems
The gambling cryptocurrency opportunity must be specifically integrated into the payment channels of a gaming venue to attract pro-crypto people. That does not mean that traditional fiat currencies must be abandoned or forgotten — no, their popularity is still high mainly because of the low level of technological advancement of most inhabitants of our planet. Another reason for fiat currencies’ popularity is tradition — they have been with humanity for thousands of years while cryptos appeared only a decade ago, to say approximately.
Marketing your crypto casino
Marketing is an important step that cannot be omitted or overlooked if anybody wants to popularize their gambling establishment. It consists of several things below. Any business should have a marketing budget and strategy. An online casino is no exception. A rule of thumb is to allocate approximately 10% of the annual revenue to marketing across all its channels (at the development stage, it might be 10% of the project cost for dev and launch).
Target audience and geographical locations
One should elaborate on a strategy for reaching target audiences in each geo. The targeting will heavily depend on the available budget, the niche approach of a gambling establishment & the peculiarities of each geo. That will all impact the ways of marketing communication, both online and offline.
One shall take into account the behavior and preferences of targeted demographic groups & consider the local laws, natural and cultural restrictions & other features important for business. When it comes to a crypto gambling establishment working on the Internet, a good starting point would be focusing on younger audiences, which get accustomed to cryptos at a much faster pace than older generations. Thus, basic kick-off ideas would be:
- leveraging sponsorships & partnerships with local businesses, organizations, groups & brands
- design highly engaging promos and personalized offers
- focus on special offers for the usage of cryptocurrencies for depositing and withdrawing, which must differ from regular fiat currencies to stimulate people to use them.
Building a brand
Building a strong brand is one of the cornerstones for its successful functioning. It will ground on such inherent elements:
- strong visual identity
- clear and understood bonuses, features & user experiences in that gambling establishment for its audience
- stability of payments & gaming outcomes
- reaching excellent reputational stability (where a license from a trusted jurisdiction significantly assists)
- working with local social media and attracting brand ambassadors
- provision of an excellent customer service
- hack-protected no-downtime servers
- optimized website speed for each specific audience (there would be pointless, for instance, to come to a region with a slow Internet if the gaming website is packed with loads of stuff that is highly traffic-consuming and is only optimal for the latest models of devices).
Advertising and promotion
Each territory has ad specifics. Surely, with a focus on the cryptocurrency gambling market, it is understood per se that all such venues bear in mind tech-savvy users, which pay little to no attention to ads on TV or in paper newspapers. But the ad strategy must be reshaped a bit if a specific casino is not exclusively about crypto but also offers fiat money and physical money or cards during the depositing and withdrawing procedures.
Customer retention strategies
Marketing business offers a variety of customer retention strategies, including such points as:
- responsive and immediately available customer support through usable and convenient channels
- high level of gamification
- regular communication, which might offer various personal in-game offers, promos, specials, tournaments & bonus ladders
- strong loyalty program, which adds tangible value for customers over time, preventing them from leaving to competitors
- side offers, like bonuses for bringing in a friend, an affiliate program for everyone interested, adjusted-over-time wager requirements for high-value players, etc.
Legal considerations for a crypto casino
A serious point of activity of any crypto and fiat gambling establishment is sticking with legal requirements and limitations imposed in each region.
For most geos, a good venue must elaborate on a number of legal documents for its problem-free functioning (not only to receive a gambling license in one of the jurisdictions but also to comply with the national and regional laws). Must-have requirements are usually these:
- Compliance with regulations & laws of every particular geo a crypto casino operates in
- Having an anti-money laundering policy
- Having a Know Your Customer (KYC) policy.
As we’ve mentioned above, cryptocurrencies naturally possess a high level of anonymity and security. But that can be compromised by national legal demands, which might require that every gambler shall be identified and controlled to a bigger or lesser degree. So, it is a very important task for every gambling establishment manager to find the right balance between the local legal requirements and the degree of confidentiality and anonymity that cryptocurrency heralds are seeking in a particular online gaming venue. What’s important — they do not have to contradict one another to evade troublemaking for a casino administration. Some jurisdictions are vague as of the time being, still pondering whether is cryptocurrency gambling or not and how it should be controlled and taxed. Other jurisdictions are already clearer about it. Yet, while the first ones represent a ‘gray zone’ to some extent when it comes to the legality of cryptocurrencies and thus, require less control over the operations of their citizens in cryptos, the second ones are more inclined to stricter control and KYC demands. What is more preferential for the functioning of each gambling establishment must be defined by its management.
Cryptocurrencies for online gambling
Developing a list of cryptos, which are allowed in a particular gambling establishment, is another important step. It might be a high temptation to think of adding just as many as possible cryptos to the casino payment system. Yet, it is not real for a number of reasons, starting with their immense number: there exist over 10 thousand cryptocurrencies in the world as of March 2023 and not all of them are expedient to add. Secondly, a too-long list will be confusing for regular users. So, below, we submit a list of the most popular options in the world, which one might consider adding:
- Bitcoin
- Ethereum
- Tether
- Litecoin
- Monero
- Binance Coin
- Ripple
- Solana
- Cardano
- XPR
- Polkadot
- Dogecoin
- Chainlink
- Avalanche
- Terra
- Shiba Inu
- Cosmos
- Polygon
- USDC.
Bearing in mind adding cryptos to the payment channels, one shall consider the possibility of having them functioning on par with regular fiat channels, which are still extremely popular among people of the planet just to prevent cutting oneself off the significant portion of revenues and clientele.
Development process for a crypto casino
During the start of a new gambling crypto establishment, one undergoes pretty much the same steps as during the launch of a regular casino with fiat money (if to look at the process on a large scale).
After the initial steps of market research and formulation of business requirements are completed, the step of technical specifications’ drawing up follows. Here, all requirements for the future gambling crypto platform are defined. Such a document is rarely small and it usually contains 100+ pages. From the technical perspective, the development process goes largely along the business and marketing processes. It is shown in the four large-scale phases below.
Discovery phase
This is the initial stage, where the analysis of the future system is carried out & high-level plans are drawn. Based on what is needed to do in software for an online gaming venue (the scope of the project), the structure of the system is created at a high level, with a further outline of the details for each of its components:
- games and gaming environment
- nodular structure of the website and the backend behind it
- user interface
- systems for CRM, accounting, taxation, operations, management, etc.
- reporting
- marketing tools
- financial & anti-fraud modules
- live chat and other channels of support & so on.
The end of this phase would be a completely prepared business-and-tech set of documents for the development.
An alternative option, which is highly popular today, is one of the white-label solutions. They allow for significantly cutting down the term, expenses & maintenance costs. Most white-label solutions are very flexible and customizable, which makes it possible to tune them up for specific requirements of crypto casino managers, based on their market analysis and discovery phase. Resorting to a white-label solution enables anyone to relatively easily enter the market of crypto and fiat casinos because they won’t need a team of developers, testers, system analysts, etc. So they can focus on client support, marketing & management teams to develop the business while the white label company will take care of the functioning of the software.
UX/UI design
This task is about pleasing the end users of crypto gambling establishments. It is at this stage they develop the graphical user interface to make it convenient, comprehensible & enjoyable for users. The success of the entire undertaking of casino-making can be defined solely by the convenience of an end user to navigate, play & have fun — if there will be problems, users will simply close the website of a ‘bad’ casino to find another.
Software development
This is the most time-consuming and money-consuming stage, which requires the active work of software engineers, coders, team leads & others involved. Depending on project parameters (which are just too numerous to highlight here), the entire assigned team can be as small as a few people or as large as hundreds of people. And the time necessary for receiving the first ready-to-test result can lie anywhere between a few weeks to over a year.
Testing and launch
Testing is a must-be procedure before launching any new software product. At this stage, a dedicated team of testers runs the product from all angles, searching for bugs, which are later to be corrected by programmers. This stage takes anywhere between days and months, depending on the scale of a product.
The launch is the final stage of rolling out the software to production servers, making it go live. It usually takes from hours to days to roll out.
Maintenance and updates for a crypto casino
This stage is ongoing and never-ending work, which is about supporting the functionality of the software (on its backend and frontend), providing client support, making sure all games and financial transactions work & resolving various issues, which arise during the normal day-to-day functioning.
When updates are necessary, they, again, fully or partially, involve teams previously involved in the project. There is a swarm of possible potential updates, amongst which we can limelight such: adding new games & new providers and removing them, adding/removing pages to the website, changing the remuneration systems of the casino or their parts, updating the interface and its design, introducing new payment methods or changing the existing ones, etc.
Future trends in crypto casinos
Can anyone open a casino? Yes; now every our reader knows it. Moreover, now they know a bit more about starting a crypto gambling establishment on the Internet and can conclude whether it is an interesting task for their businesses or not. And to dive into more details, let us briefly overview the future trends in crypto gaming, which, this way or another, will shape the future face of the industry:
- improved security
- enhancing KYC and anti-money-laundering procedures
- ever-increasing adoption of cryptocurrencies on a global scale
- expanding usage of virtual and augmented reality
- bigger involvement of artificial intelligence in the e-gaming industry
- appearance of decentralized casinos.
Cryptos & blockchain aren’t going anywhere. They develop and fluctuate the same, as any other area of our life. We can predict that more cryptocurrency gambling establishments will appear in the future. The question is, will you jump into an already fast-paced train of technological and crypto development by making and running a new crypto casino or will you regret not doing that in the future?