iGaming Daily

Ted (00:01.309)
Today, iGaming Daily speaks to industry figurehead Nigel Echols who backs crypto led utilities to bring forward the next evolution of the iGaming sector. On SBC, the co-founder of Fandual penned a feature citing that crypto in iGaming should be viewed as a marriage of equals. However, Echols views that the industry's top ranks are yet to understand crypto as a technology discipline and the utilities it can bring to iGaming as an industry which needs to regain its trust with consumers.

A serial entrepreneur, Nigel is prepared to roll the dice once more with Bet Hog, a venture that is built for fair play and will piggyback on crypto innovations to drive change. I'm Ted Memwear and I would like to welcome Nigel Eccles to the iGaming Daily. Nigel, how are doing?

Nigel Eccles (00:47.427)
I'm good. Thank you. Thanks for having me, Joe.

Ted (00:49.523)
and I heard you stayed away but you watched the NFL Super Bowl, how did that go?

Nigel Eccles (00:56.753)
Yes, I caught it last night. Yeah, no, it was a like, wasn't a great game, you know, it was a game if you're an Eagles fan, so it was entertaining.

Ted (01:06.784)
Yes, yes, I mean we watched it here closely. So let's kick off and I want to start with the question that everyone wants to know. Why do you call a new venture Bet Hog?

Nigel Eccles (01:22.095)
Bedhug. It's a little bit of a joke. So I'm actually from a farming background. So I was brought up on a dairy farm and we had pigs. And when we came up with Bedhug, we wanted...

We wanted something that people would smile at and we sort of felt that a lot of the brands in bedding, they're just really boring, right? They're just like, they're, you know, they're super serious. They just don't, they seem to forget that this is an entertainment product. And so we, when we were thinking about what our brand would be, we were like, look, we want a mascot. We want somebody that's sort of fun and, you know, approachable and, and, and doesn't take itself too seriously. And so that's how we came up with Bedhug.

Ted (01:43.944)
Mm-hmm.

Ted (02:10.695)
Yeah, I really like the aesthetic. It's very different. And I think you've also kind of taken on like a different appeal to it. It's more kind of open. It's more fun. It's more of an expressive brand too.

Nigel Eccles (02:14.149)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (02:22.341)
Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (02:25.967)
That's right. Yeah. So like that was the thing. Like we wanted like we've got a character, which is the hog. We've we ran a bit of a naming competition and the winner was Kevin, obviously Kevin Bacon. And so he sort of taking this role as a sort of bookmaker that you play against. And like it's.

Ted (02:32.552)
Hmm.

Ted (02:46.099)
You

Nigel Eccles (02:51.633)
It seems to be working like the users like love this concept. Yeah, and we just love the idea of the whole site and product having a personality and yeah, just sort of worked all the way from the name all the way through to the product.

Ted (03:07.719)
I mean, reflecting back on your career and, you know, especially with the development of FanDuel, I mean, you're a very kind of of pro brand creation and creating strong brands and how have you kind of your learnings from FanDuel going to transfer to that in your new ventures?

Nigel Eccles (03:13.745)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (03:17.881)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (03:26.767)
Yeah, well, know, fan, though, in a lot of ways, we actually try to play really safe. You know, at the time, it wasn't very clear. You know, it was clear, but there wasn't sort of clear laws around Daily Fantasy Sports. And so we tried to play safe. One of the things we did do with Fandl and it's actually in the name was we wanted to put the player at the core of the product. So fan, a sports fan is actually in the name. And so and

Ted (03:53.043)
you

Nigel Eccles (03:56.751)
of our marketing, if you actually see the marketing, all of our advertising in the early years, we were very endorsement heavy. We were very, you know, we actually put our real players in the ads. And that was very successful. So we tried to build FanDuel as a like a player centric product and a company. And so we definitely learned a lot about that with with Bet Hogg, definitely taking a similar approach there in that

We spend a lot of time talking to our users and understanding why they play the games. It's a very different product. Like Bed Hog is much more of a casino product. And I sort of feel that...

Ted (04:39.795)
Mm.

Nigel Eccles (04:42.609)
a lot of casino players aren't really as well understood as maybe like DFS players. DFS players are often understood because they're like young male competitive. So they're more similar to the entrepreneurs who build these companies. Whereas casino players, they're not playing for the same competitive reasons. It's much more of an entertainment experience. They want the sort of the thrills, the highs and the lows.

And so I often find that some of the casinos that build them don't maybe interview and spend as much time understanding those consumers.

Ted (05:20.627)
So let's kind of move on to your new venture, but kind of that the your journey towards kind of bet hog. And I want to of tap your brain as a technologist and an entrepreneur. And how do you assess an opportunity in a new technology? And how do you say, well, that's that fits gaming and especially where you were in terms of having left Fandual because you did choose other other other sectors to look at too.

Nigel Eccles (05:31.908)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (05:36.305)
Mm-hmm.

Oof. Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (05:46.701)
Yeah, yeah. Looked at a lot of it's, you know, that's a that's a big question. And there isn't unfortunately, there isn't a simple answer, right? Because if there was a simple answer.

you know, everyone you would just have like success after success. And, you know, my experience as an entrepreneur is that, you know, to have big successes, you really have to eat a lot of failure. You know, you have to have like things that you'd star and things that look as promising as the big successes. And you have to invest a lot of time and effort into them.

Ted (06:12.147)
You

Nigel Eccles (06:22.991)
to discover that they just aren't the opportunity that you thought they were. So it's definitely hard. Innovation is messy. I think there's certain mistakes that I now have realized that I've made in the past and I see entrepreneurs make. some of those mistakes are things like sometimes people innovate just too much, right? They create a totally new product, a totally new category. And like a classic example of that is...

you know, we see within Casino, you know, we've created some really original games. Now we, we haven't invested too much in it, but it's just been more experiments, but we often find when users come in, they will come in and play Blackjack and Baccarat and Sugar Rush. You know, they, they want to play games that they're familiar with. And so it's just constantly a reminder that people like playing games they're familiar with. And so.

Ted (07:07.503)
Sure.

Nigel Eccles (07:17.411)
what we need to do is incrementally take them on a journey and say, okay, you like that game, great, keep playing it. Here's something else or here's that plus a little bit more. Instead of coming in and think that we can sell them to come and do something totally different. that's something I think is a real kind of eye-opener is not to try and totally change user behavior on day one.

Ted (07:25.607)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (07:43.971)
Maybe in time you get there, but you need to understand that people like playing the games they know they like playing.

Ted (07:50.987)
and you're betting big on crypto and blockchain utilities. So I guess I'll lead by just saying what do you think kind of this new technology of crypto and blockchain? What is it fundamentally changing about iGaming?

Nigel Eccles (07:56.068)
Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (08:04.24)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (08:08.625)
Yeah, quite a lot of things. The first one and most simply is just payments. As an onshore operator, you're paying between 12 and 15 % of your revenues.

It's just going straight to Visa, MasterCard, payment processors. That is dead money, right? No one gets any value for that. Add on top of that fraud, all of the customer service elements that you have to deal on top of that. If you're dealing working internationally, that number can be a lot higher, 20, 30%. With crypto?

that number goes to pretty close to zero. I don't have to deal with, I don't have to deal with chargebacks. The cost of payment transfers to Bedhug is almost zero. And what does that mean? It means I can take that 20 to 30 % and I can give it straight back to the player. It's like, wow, I can, you know, I've just cut my prices by 20, 30%. That's amazing. That's an amazing experience for the player. So that's the first one, which is just payments. And that itself is, is transformational.

The second thing that I would say is I think crypto brings in a sort of a totally new community. know, there isn't a Visa or MasterCard community, but there is a crypto community. These are people that have cryptocurrencies that maybe buy meme coins, have NFTs. And they are...

An interesting class of people, they collectively crypto is worth about, depending on the day of the week, three to three and a half trillion dollars. So they've got a ton of money. They're very risk seeking because it's a very volatile asset. And they, you know, they like highly volatile games. And so we've been leaning into that and sort of building games that we think they would like and kind of working with them to sort of understand them. We make sure that our product kind of talks their language.

Nigel Eccles (10:10.842)
that we kind of, that we understand them and then when they get to they get it, they understand our product. And so that also I think is a really big unlock.

Ted (10:20.531)
And focusing on this community of crypto players, I mean, these aren't consumers that you think that you can tap up with regular kind of fiat products or traditional sports betting, iGaming or sports betting platforms. Is this just a separate type of consumer?

Nigel Eccles (10:23.707)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (10:35.675)
Mm-hmm.

Actually, you know, the funny thing is even in that group, you know, the majority of them still like the traditional games. Like they will come in and play Blackjack, Baccarat, they'll play Sugar Rush, you know. So they will play all of those sports bets. So they'll do all the traditional ones. They'll definitely lean much more towards the sort of crash games. So they'll want to play dice. They'll want to play mines.

Ted (10:48.499)
Mm-hmm.

Ted (11:07.048)
Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (11:08.038)
they'll want to play Crash or a game we have called Hogger, which is a Crash game. So they're much more lean towards that, but they love Blackjack, Baccarat and slot games as well. So they're not that different.

Ted (11:24.659)
And so moving on to to Bet Hog and you know your mantra of building this product you state that it's built for fair play and built to of regain that trust. Can you take SBC audiences through that and you know what what new why that is such a big utility for gaming?

Nigel Eccles (11:29.2)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (11:38.062)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (11:49.052)
Yeah, well, like even like something simple, there's probably I haven't tried to count them all, but I estimate there's maybe like 500 crypto casinos today. So we're 501 of those 500 crypto casinos. I think maybe less than five have the you know, the CEO founders name and picture on the website.

Maybe even less than three. In fact, I actually don't know of any. You know, so it seems like a very small innovation that to say, like, you know, you can trust us. Our name is on this. Like that's, you know, that should be a first thing is you should know who you're betting with. Right. Like that, that shouldn't be a that shouldn't be a risk.

Ted (12:18.215)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ted (12:36.243)
But at the same time, I can flip that and say, do the consumers of your fan deals and DraftKings, do they know who the CEO of Plata Entertainment or... Oh, retain, okay.

Nigel Eccles (12:48.187)
Who's?

yeah, well, yeah, I do they, think they do, you know, certainly DraftKings, certainly when I was, yeah, you can find that information. Certainly when we were building Fandil, they did, because that was something that was very public and we were very public about it. I think it sort of builds a level of trust that...

Ted (12:58.503)
I mean, they can find that information, yes, but...

Nigel Eccles (13:11.048)
You know, they know who is there. I was on Twitter. I would get DM'd about something, an issue on the product and I would deal with it. I think that's very important. I think that crypto casinos have led a lot also on trust. So they've built like products that have, there's a...

type of product, is verifiably fair, which is, you know, if I'm playing a third party casino game, how do I know it's fair? Right. And every casino player who loses has this fear that like, well, how do I know this is fair? How do I know it hasn't been scanned? Well, with crypto casinos, can actually, and the good ones, including us, what we do is we can actually show you that it's verifiably fair. So you can actually go and consult the blockchain to show that we

you know, there was no way we could have changed the results just based on your betting. So it's verifiably fair. That's an innovation. I think there was stake that led that. That's that to me is like a hugely important unlock that you can really risk a lot of money on this knowing that, you know, your money's safe.

Ted (14:23.855)
Okay, crypto...

As someone who calls iGaming, crypto still is divisive to some extent. There are elements and there are bad actors to this. You state that you've put yourself forward and that want your players to know that you are the CEO, that you are the leader of this bit of your business and you want transparency. But do you understand the skepticism towards cryptocurrency as it's

Nigel Eccles (14:32.348)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (14:43.792)
Mm-hmm.

Ted (14:58.207)
stands now and that I wouldn't say pessimism but just that there are kind of blind spots in in crypto currency as it stands today.

Nigel Eccles (14:59.536)
Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (15:10.129)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (15:13.882)
Yeah. yeah. So there is a huge amount of skepticism and mistrust towards cryptocurrency today. And some of it is merited, but a lot of it is not. like cryptocurrency is accused of being, you know, used for to fund terrorism, for money laundering, for tax evasion, you know, for drug smuggling, like kind of

choose your vices at where you know the funny thing is when you actually go through it oftentimes crypto is probably one of the worst things to use for these things and the reason is is that crypto by and large is completely public so that actual transaction is completely public and so whenever there's a huge scam you can see who exactly not only who did it

Ted (15:43.443)
Hmm.

Nigel Eccles (16:13.244)
but how they did it. And you can trace all the funds, the sort of funds all the way going through.

generally if you're money laundering, the biggest place for money laundering and funding terrorism drugs is actually cash. Cash is still king, right? And so the first thing is crypto is actually really bad for a lot of these things. It has been used, but generally, you know, it's actually pretty bad for it. The second thing is the things that you can use to combat a lot of this stuff is still the same whether somebody using PayPal, credit card or crypto. So things like KYC, anti-money laundering,

you know, all of those things like geolocation, these are all things that we can do regardless of whether using credit card or you're depositing using crypto. And so it's sort of, they're sort of independent. So if, if in the UK, for example, there's nothing to stop the UK regulator saying to the regulator operator, say, yeah, sure, you can take crypto. All the other same rules apply.

And there would be no increase in kind of sort of threat factor because, you know, you can still do source of funds, you can still do KYC, you can still do AML. So it's kind of strange to me that that the regulator would view it differently because it was in this sort of new class of money.

Ted (17:25.427)
Mm.

Ted (17:36.923)
Okay, and then my response to that, mean, what is the harm that...

there is no kind of regulatory progress on crypto and that we're just kind of stuck in this kind of current status, just debating it endlessly. And what is your message to regulators? Because the players will always choose, the players will migrate to this option, right? And as you said in your statement to SBC, so what would you tell a regulator who has a hard job in interpreting laws and

Nigel Eccles (17:49.135)
Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (17:53.231)
Yeah.

Nigel Eccles (17:57.072)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Nigel Eccles (18:10.532)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ted (18:13.269)
laying down these kind of frameworks.

Nigel Eccles (18:14.98)
Yeah. It's, you know, lack of.

Lack of having, and we saw this in the US, which was sort of regulation by enforcement, which was, we're gonna pretend that we have, the existing laws are sufficient. We're gonna pretend that there hasn't been any innovation in like a hundred years. We're gonna pretend that all of these things are clearly securities when they were not. And what that resulted in was that the good actors like Coinbase, Uniswap, all of these ones who were building real products,

sued by the government while the real scams were just running off anonymously and everyone was getting defrauded and I think it's actually similar in well it's actually you know

in online gambling, what we're seeing is I think the onshore operators, which could be taking crypto money, are not getting it. And that money is, well, I don't actually have much visibility on it, but some of that money potentially is going to a black market because people who have crypto who are in a regulated market are probably like, well, I want to go and bet with.

you know, I'll go and bet wherever and they're going to the black market operators. And so I think regulated markets are missing out in that there's those users who, you know, have money in crypto. That's what they want to bet in. And they would prefer to bet with a regulated operator where they feel it's more secure, but it's actually going off to the black market.

Ted (19:45.882)
And just that's my final two questions. You know, in looking forward, where do you think that crypto will be intertwined with iGaming by the end of the decade? How do you see that kind of, what's your big picture here?

Nigel Eccles (19:48.368)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (19:57.466)
Mm-hmm.

Nigel Eccles (20:01.445)
Yeah. So I think two things. think over the next five years, we're going to see dramatic growth in crypto casino crypto gaming. And I think that there's no doubt.

that crypto casinos are the leaders in online casino. Like Stake to me is the clear leader, not only in crypto casino, but in online casino. They are the ones that have over the last five years have shown the most innovation, shown the fastest growth, just kind of like the sort of...

in many ways, the kind of, you know, the sort of, you know, the biggest sort of star. But I think the second one is that in 10 years time, I don't think there will be a crypto casino sector because I just don't think there will be casinos that will not take crypto. think there will, I think regulated operators, the regulators in that period will be like, of course, we're going to have to, this is people want to spend with us money. Why would we not let them? And so I do

that they will merge. We're already seeing stake is coming onshore in certain markets. So I think in 10 years time, the two markets are going to kind of merge together and it'll just going to be one market. be crypto. In the same way we used to talk about online commerce, right? We don't talk about online commerce anymore. We just talk about commerce. And the same way as we won't talk about crypto casinos anymore, we'll just talk about casinos.

Ted (21:24.093)
you

Ted (21:30.611)
Okay so Nigel you're launching your new venture and I think we've got to grant every kind of entrepreneur kind of that golden nugget of why everyone should be following Bet Hogg in 2025. Take it away.

Nigel Eccles (21:44.713)
Thank you.

Ted (21:50.195)
Night.