iGaming Daily

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Afternoon everyone, welcome to today's episode of RGaming Daily sponsored by Optimove. I'm Ted Orme Clay and I'm here with Cal and Williams, both of us representing the payment expert and inside of sport teams as usual. And today we're going to get into a topic we've not talked about for a while. I don't think many people have talked about for a while actually. So really sort of blowing the dust off this one and that's NFTs. A lot of our listeners will probably remember the hype around NFTs that we had from 2020 and 2021 in particular going into 2022 a bit.

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Obviously when this started to die off and at this point they've kind of, apart from a few spaces, they've really sort of faded into memory when it comes to a lot of conversation around blockchain technology. But this week we saw quite a big development regarding convergence of betting and NFTs with DraftKings in the US announcing the closure of its NFT marketplace. Before we get into this topic, first obviously a word for our sponsor Optimove.

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Optimove is the number one CRA marketing solution for the iGaming market. To get a free demo with Optimove go to www.optimove.com slash SBC and we'll also leave some links to this in the description for this episode. So, Callum, how's it going mate, you alright? I'm good Teddy, I'm good. We're actually getting some warm weather in the UK now. So, that's alright I guess. I was a bit... I was...

01:24
on the fence as to whether I should wear a pair of shorts to the office today this morning because it was absolutely chucking it down wasn't it? But I thought I'd roll the dice a bit and give it a go and thankfully by the looks of it out of the windows it's paid off. So yeah, should be a decent commute home later at least. But right, so you've been on the payment expert beat a bit longer than me and you're kind of our resident blockchain and crypto sort of specialist really. So just to start things off.

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For our listeners who might be a bit more uninitiated on this, what is an NFT? What's the purpose of them and how do they differ from crypto? Could you give our listeners a bit of a breakdown for that? Yeah Ted, so NFTs they kind of came into prominence as a digital asset of a collectible pretty much. They are digital collectibles, they run on blockchain technology. They can be purchased with crypto and mainly crypto. So you put in your fiat currency.

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Exchange that into crypto and then you've got your NFT. Now an NFT could pretty much be anything really I know during the initial boom period which we'll talk about More in depth in a bit. They it was it was like pieces of art So and these pieces of art would then like a physical piece of art would obviously Go for more valuation the longer it goes and the more interest there is the price will rise and then obviously you have you had

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the surge of celebrities like Justin Bieber, Neymar was for instance, binding these NFTs. So yeah, the celebrity endorsement of these NFTs back in 2020 and 2021, it kind of just exploded the term into the mainstream for a little bit. But as far as it differs from crypto, I mean, it's still one and the same thing really, as opposed to crypto is being used to buy.

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the digital collectible. But more so crypto is more used as I'd say as a payment tool, but over recent times it's been being used more as an investment tool like Bitcoin and Ethereum or whatsoever. So yeah, it's the NFTs have quickly died down over the past year or so, which I'm sure we're going to get on to, but they can be used for all types of things, not just art pieces.

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tickets for concerts, loyalty programs, that type of stuff for retail. So yeah, there are some interesting use cases you can use with NFTs. So I guess really, I mean, I may be oversimplifying this a bit, but obviously both cryptocurrency and NFTs are blockchain based assets, aren't they? The difference is obviously the crypto, as you said, is more of a payment method. And as the name suggests, the currency, Boston NFT is like a blockchain based product, isn't it really?

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Which can, and then the sort of link between the two is, as you said, both of them can be an investment opportunity. Yeah, with the blockchain technology as well, that anyone who owns the NFT is pretty much their copyright, their ownership is basically put onto the blockchain. So it's the public domain, but it's also there's verification that they own this, and then there's investment contracts and smart contracts.

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outlining this. And then from what I remember that was kind of really one of the big selling points of them wasn't it during that whole boom period that we obviously were going to get into later. Obviously a lot of different stakeholders were getting involved in that as you said there was a lot in entertainment and in sports. Kind of one of the things to really sort of ground it with the overarching agenda of this podcast obviously a lot of betting companies did as well because I remember

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For one example, for a bit closer to Home of Us in the UK, I remember Entain launched, I can't remember what year it was in now, but they launched this sort of innovation hub sort of thing. It was backed by I think about a £100 million investment. They were looking at lots of stuff like virtual reality, augmented reality and all that. One of the things they were looking at was NFTs. I think a lot of betting companies were kind of, they wanted to see how they could involve NFTs and the hype around it into their operations.

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kind of like what you said about loyalty programs as well. I think that was definitely part of it, as well as just sort of the ability for their users to win NFTs and contests and things like that. In the US, I think they probably had the biggest impact because we've seen DraftKings launch its NFT marketplace back in 2021. And then it launched the Rainmakers initiative in 2022. And these kind of combined for our listeners, these, this combines kind of daily fantasy sports

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which is something DraftKings has quite a big history in. Obviously they were a fantasy sports provider first weren't they before getting into betting, from what I remember. The big news this week is, as I said in the introduction, they've closed that down, which I think is a really sort of significant development. I think there is a, part of this is due to an ongoing legal case, which we won't get into too much, but I just think it's interesting this sort of shows how much NFTs have went from that.

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went to the forefront of a lot of these technological discussions, both in Beying and elsewhere. And now we've really sort of been relegated to it. I mean, obviously, we're going to talk now about this, the NFT boom that we saw. I mean, that started in around 2020, right? Yeah, it came around 2020. So it was covered period. So a lot of people just online, I think a lot of people were, it's also coincides with the boom that the crypto market experienced during 2020 and 2021.

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people were just at home, they were online, they were almost kind of almost looking for new ways to make money in a sense really. I mean meme coins like Doge were taken off as kind of almost pretty much, if you want to simplify it, get rich quick schemes. Yeah, I remember that. That was huge, wasn't it, for a bit? Yeah, yeah. That was real proliferation in that. Yeah, and then obviously the market downturned in 2022, but I would say that the NFTs were being viewed

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this next iteration of technological advancement and being able, in terms of ownership, there's no third party involved, which is kind of the essence of blockchain technology. There's no third party involved. It's a peer-to-peer transaction whilst also using crypto. And it was just being viewed as this, this security blanket almost for peer-to-peer users. Ownership as well was very, very big. But I think it kind of got lost in its way simply because of the whole...

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celebrity endorsement type of thing and there was going for it. There was pieces that was being bought for like millions, millions of dollars. Yeah, it was huge, wasn't it? There was some cases of people just, there was one really, no, there's one really kind of notorious case, wasn't there? I think where someone had miss sold an NFT for like $30 or something. It was actually worth like 300 grand or something like that on the market at the time. And yeah, there were loads of loads of cases of people buying them just for yeah, the equivalent of a few quid. And then within a couple of months,

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Yeah, God knows and much more than that. Also other cases of people buying them for a lot of money and suddenly it dropping in value, wasn't it? I think it's also kind of indicative of how people are short term attention spans kind of lost as well. Like if it's not expected to be like a long term type thing, which Draft Kings, well, you know, you can't really blame them for getting type of involved in the, in the NFT space. I know there's a big collectible, a big sports card collectible.

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seen in the US with trading cards and whatnot, so sports stars trading cards that type of thing. It's not a bad idea initially, but I think the long term, I don't think anyone was taking in long term projections of what NFTs could be during that boom period. I don't think there was many people looking into the what's going to happen with NFTs in the next several years or so. Yeah, I mean and you mentioned earlier obviously the importance of this occurring during that COVID period. I don't want to sound too cynical on it, but

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might also just be a part of, like you said, everyone was sort of stuck indoors needing something to do and this whole, this big trend was occurring and this big craze was occurring and it would, and as a result of that, you know, people had a lot of free time, a lot of, they were looking for something to do. I don't know if maybe that could have been part of it and now that when COVID rules eased and we've got back into the normal sort of day to day, day to day lives, same as it was pre 2020, pre 2019, that interest has kind of faded with it,

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among some more dedicated followers, I guess, and people who are really, really tuned in to like blockchain and crypto developments. Or as you said, among people who are very into that whole collectible thing, like you said, in the US, trading cards have been huge for ages, haven't they? Like baseball trading cards. Yeah, like Fnatic's are doing quite a lot of stuff. Yeah, exactly, yeah. So it's still there, but it's really gone, it's really gone from...

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Yeah, and maybe decline isn't the right word, but it's certainly fallen from the forefront of a lot of conversation around this. Yeah, it's definitely, in my view, it's definitely declined in terms of popularity. I think the technology itself is still quite interesting in terms of how it can be used in certain industries and for certain loyalty cards, for certain loyalty programs and certain loyalty rewards programs that retail companies can use.

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In 2022, the crypto market did hit a pretty big crash during May, I think it was. Teraluna was the one that collapsed first, which then sent the market downwards and then FTX. I'm pretty sure you've all heard about the FTX collapse in November of that year. That kind of just set consumer fears right down the drain. So yeah, while the crypto market has been recovering from that, the NFT market hasn't really. Payment Expert, we covered a report from Dap Gamble.

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in September, 2023, which revealed that 95% of the over 73,000 NFTs that were surveyed, 95% of all those NFTs were pretty much deemed worthless after the mainstream market collapse. So that just kind of tells you the like, the stark decline that it experienced in 2022 and 2023. S0N3N1E1 Yeah, I think that figure more than anything really shows the extent it fell off, didn't it? From like we said, going from

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these NFT sort of art collectible things going for up to millions back in 2021 in particular to now being called into this report completely worthless. We'll go into a bit more detail on this later. I think we just need to take a quick ad break and then we'll be right back to discuss some more things to do with NFTs and blockchain and all that. Okay, and we're back. Welcome back to our gaming daily where, yeah, we're going to continue this discussion around NFTs and where everything's going. So obviously...

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Kicking things off, we talked about how DraftKings has shut down its NFT marketplace. In my opinion, that's quite a significant indicator of how much these assets have fallen off. And Callum, you gave our audience quite a good breakdown there of basically about how much the value of these has declined. The thing is though, they've not entirely gone away, have they? And as always, blockchain technology is still there. If anything, that's just increased in usage.

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a lot of the assets off that have increased in value with the exception of NFTs. So I guess looking on that, what are some of the current use cases for NFTs and other sort of digital assets? Where do they currently stand in all of this? Yeah, well in terms of NFTs, I think there's obviously there's sceptics, there's more sceptics than there are believers, but I think you need to talk about, if you're talking about sceptics of NFTs, then you also talk about sceptics of crypto and blockchain, they kind of form into the same group, right?

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Just like anything, I know this downward spiral that's occurred for NFTs at the moment is obviously a stark one. You've got to remember blockchain technology, crypto, NFTs, all these web-free based products, they're all still in their relative infancy. I mean, we're not even talking about 20 years until before this technology was formed and developed and founded. So I definitely do think that NFTs, whilst people's perception of NFTs are these

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almost type of like scam type things. They definitely do have some real world advantages when it pertains to tickets, for example. I know Lazio, their sponsoring partner, Binance, they started to use their match day tickets as part of NFTs. Now this can give off additional benefits like potentially discount on drinks at the

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£5 off on merchandise and stuff like that. So there's additional benefits to these once you have them in your mobile wallet and then you can potentially then access the NFT through that. I know that Latio have also launched the FAN token with Binance. That's not really an NFT, that's more to do with the crypto side, but you know, I mean, really it's more about engaging the FAN and giving the FAN additional experiences and benefits to just

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experience. So it's also being used as well in terms of retail and old Dolce & Gabbana. They've been doing a lot of stuff in terms of digital collectible fashion pieces. Nike are probably the leaders in my opinion in terms of giving out collectible sneakers and really driving home the importance of exclusivity.

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Yeah, what you've noted there is obviously, I think one of the areas that we're seeing a lot of continued convergence and a lot of interest is still in sports, isn't it? That really does seem to be the big one. Like you said with Lazio, I mean, I know that if we're going to take things a bit closer to home, like your local side, Man City, they obviously have this partnership with OKX and I think they've been doing some stuff, similar kind of things together in the fan token and NFT and collectible space, haven't they? Yeah. This year. So we're still seeing that.

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The ticketing one's also quite interesting because I remember, again, harking back to 2021 when there was the Euros final. There were a few discussions after that because obviously there were a lot of issues there with a lot of England fans showing up without tickets. There was a bit of a discussion afterwards as to how it'd probably take a lot of work and I don't really know how bothered the UA for in the FA would be with going through with it, but it'd be having like tickets based on NFTs and on like a blockchain sort of basis

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they're more identifiable and you're less likely to get scam tickets and things like that which then obviously helps with safety. Obviously part of that as well though is a lot of these fans are shown without tickets and just kicking the way through the doors weren't they? So I don't really think NFTs can stop that. NFTs can't stop the brute force of the fans. But you know there was an interesting discussion there and I was kind of interested to see if that was going to come back up.

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after the Copa America final lately where they had a similar problem with some fans showing up just without tickets. Although again, I think that was just cases of a lot of people just breaking in because they were that desperate to see their team. But looking ahead, I know we've seen something lately as well with our colleague Kieran on Inside of Sport covered something that FIFA are doing at the moment with NFTs in the build up to the 2026 World Cup, I think it is. They have their platform, I think it's called FIFA plus

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and they're offering fans the chance to, I believe it's to win tickets to the World Cup through this, through some sort of scheme they're running on there. So that shows that it is still going, and especially in the sports side of things. I think the other thing I think that's quite important to talk about is, as you said earlier with it being affected by the value of NFTs getting affected by confidence in the market, at the end of the day, crypto and NFTs, that's what they are. They are a market and they're impacted by real world events.

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all of these crypto blockchain and NFT markets and so on, really felt the impact of those scandals that you referred to, like the FTX scandal in particular really dealt a blow, didn't it? Evaluations really sunk. But we've recently seen Bitcoin rebound massively because of the Securities and Exchange Commission approving Bitcoin ETFs in the US. And we've now seen Ethereum ETFs approved as well. So the crypto market has really been riding quite a big wave off that in recent years. So, you

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It just goes to show you never know in the future something similar could happen for sort of NFTs and that as well perhaps. Yeah, I would say with the NFT market you think it would potentially go back up in value. I see NFTs now moving into a second cycle looking at more retail value and more retail sensors with the obviously with the examples we've gave. I think it's you're going to start seeing a lot more consumer confidence in.

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NFTs, the more they're being used in a consumer type sense. I think a lot of consumers are obviously going to have more confidence in them if they're giving them additional benefits from buying goods or loading up reward points at Tesco's. So I think we're going to look at NFTs a bit more differently over the next couple of years in terms of not them being for sale and we're using these. Obviously they'll still exist, but I think we are going to look at NFTs in a more real retail sense and a more loyalty.

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and reward sense in terms of how our company is now going to look at not just giving out our email receipt but then what turn the email receipt into an NFT potentially and then it can then track data and your past shopping experiences and tailor that type of stuff. I think those type of real world experiences I think NFTs can definitely provide real world benefits.

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Yeah, it's more of the use cases of what they'll bring to the customer and ultimately bring to the business as well, I guess, and like play a role in redefining that relationship and strengthening it really. I think that might be something that some betting companies might be wanting to keep an eye on, certainly ones with more bigger tech teams, tech departments and more money to put into that area. Obviously, betting companies have massive customer bases and a lot of them are based both on retail and online. Yeah. So, there's maybe another...

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chance for them to bridge that sort of customer gap. And potentially, Jeff Kings, I mean, I don't think they're probably looking to open back that NFT marketplace anytime soon. But yeah, I think they really kind of found a niche there with the sports collectible card type thing with sports stars. And I think as long as that sector and community of people begins to grow, then yeah, they potentially could bring it back and it's potentially a big...

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revenue driver for not just companies but for people as well? It'll be 100% something interesting to keep an eye on with how all this develops and I think it'll be quite interesting as things continue to compare how the technology moves now to what it was like during that 2020 to 2022 boom period. Obviously you can keep an eye on all these sort of things on the payment expert and insider support given that this falls under the agenda of both sides.

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Callum, myself and our colleague here and I'll make sure to keep you all updated on that and I'm sure be on future episodes of iGaming Daily as well. So I think that's it for today, but thanks to all our listeners for tuning in and see you next time.