First, as a TLDR, today we announced we are releasing a native crypto token for Rivalry, and kicked off farming. Eligible users, i.e. those that can legally use Rivalry, can start to pre-earn into the token by being active on the site, and by doing so they earn NUTZ. We call this PLAY-2-FARM™. Users participate in this at various Nut Ranks, ex. NUTWHISPERER and NUTGOBBLER, which are assigned to them based on their total activity level, and carry different attributes. Think of it as an RPG game where you do things (activity on Rivalry), level up a character (Nut Rank), and collect loot (NUTZ), which builds your inventory… or on Rivalry, your nutsack. The more NUTZ you collect, the more tokens you receive on the eventual airdrop. The experience is incredible, and was made possible by the world class talent at Rivalry.
Now onto the thot piece. Online gambling has changed significantly in the last few years. Technology, as it always has through history, is disrupting. Let me be more specific. Rewind a few years and the following attack vectors made operating a global gambling business on the internet with no regard for regulation challenging:
Go after the people. Someone operating in your country that shouldn't be? Go after them. They are easy to find, it’s tough to run a web2 company and be undiscoverable. Not every country is willing to go beyond its jurisdiction to mess with you, but someone like the US will. But now it's 2024, and in 2024 it is very easy to operate a business on the internet, like online gambling, 100% anonymously.
Block the domains. Okay, maybe you can’t get the people and threaten them easily, so just block the domains. Spurred by torrent sites fighting against constant blocks came innovation. Running mirrors of your website and making it impossible or very challenging to block is now relatively straightforward to do.
Attack the payments. This was the last line of defense. Find the movement of money and shut it down, raid it, or whatever it may be to create so much friction that the customer experience is untenable. With crypto this is a thing of the past, permanently. And don’t take this to be me implying crypto is enabling illegal activity, fiat is worse, I’m simply being direct that crypto’s intrinsic nature as a ubiquitous 24/7 global payment method solves this. Not only does it solve it, crypto has no maintenance windows, no middle man, no outages like a traditional payment provider, and is near-instantaneous in and out… it is objectively better in every way.
Let me connect the dots on all this. It is now possible to operate an online gambling business anywhere in the world anonymously, where your site can also never be effectively blocked, and your payments always work. When this is the case, you can reduce customer friction to near zero because you report to nobody. Customers can play anonymously, just as you the operator are, or under an identity that is not their true one. So for online gamblers, of which an increasing percentage is a generation that grew up on the internet, where their gamertag or online persona is as real to them as their physical world one… well, they love this kind of product.
What I’ve just described exists today, and these products are growing in number and popularity. Many of them explicitly advertise ‘anonymous play,’ and have web traffic mostly coming out of highly regulated markets like the US and EU.
And the challenge is, especially in regulated markets, these products are often better than the regulated ones. Without having to adhere to a strict regulated regime, customers experience less friction to get into the experience they want, payments are faster, the product is more diverse, and generally more innovative. They have no marketing restrictions and are therefore fully unencumbered to share value propositions however they please.
Now sure, affiliate businesses may not work with them, and traditional media channels will ask for a license they don’t have… but who cares, those channels get in front of a customer they don’t even want! They are going after an entirely different generation and psychographic. Like Rivalry, they win on social, creators, fostering web-based communities, bespoke online-only marketing moments, and by simply understanding how to execute ‘gamba’ on the internet.
As the mature cohort of customers increasingly age out in these markets, market share is only going to accelerate toward this kind of operator, or those that are above board but understand how to execute within this meta (ex. Rivalry). Today, estimates already put crypto gambling at up to one quarter of global betting handle, and that’s growing fast. This is a train that can’t be stopped.
For regulators, this means they will have come to terms with the fact that they are no longer required as a permissioning / gating system for operators to exist within their market. They already aren't (have you even read anything I said up until here?). Many of their efforts today feel like observing someone trying to erect slightly higher castle walls to defend against attackers with jet packs. Want my advice on how to future proof against this… and I know you didn’t ask for it but I’m going to give it… step back and take a different approach:
Think of yourself like a country soliciting investment. “Hey you, gambling operator that wants to take customers from my country, listen here, we have a robust economy, stable political system, great knowledge workers, effective banking, various grants and incentives, we are e/acc, not decel, have solid healthcare, affordable housing, and safe neighborhoods, come get a local license and invest in us today!” Be an accelerant and create advantages in a world where on the internet of 2024 your permission is no longer required. Create so many competitive advantages that it nets off the cost of being regulated and enables a customer experience so superior that your countrymen would be silly not to play on a licenced product. Don’t be drag, be thrust. Help them win, and then you win (revenue, duh).
Learn about this technology, implement, and innovate alongside it. That’s the obvious one, but had to be said anyways. Don’t keep trying to make the castle wall higher; by the time you get to the Moon, the tech will be on Zyphron-9 (made that up, well AI did… see what I did there, I leveraged new technology!).
You can read all that and think it can’t possibly last, surely someone will find some way to shut these sites down (did you read the part about how you literally can't?), and you go back to your comfortable beliefs on right and wrong, regulated and unregulated, or, you can be a shrewd observer and try to digest what this means and how it may impact your business as time goes on.
And don’t take this to be my or Rivalry’s endorsement of this behavior, it’s not. I’m simply an active participant in this global game, just like many of you reading this, and like you, I want to win. To do so, sometimes you have to look right at the thing that makes you uncomfortable, realize its potential, and embrace it.
“If you are used to participating in blockchain networks, you are used to people looking at you funny or thinking what you do is silly or a scam. Often there aren’t names for what you’re working on. Inside-out technologies arrive nicely packaged, ready for the market. Outside-in technologies arrive messy, mysterious, disguised as something else. Grasping their potential takes work.” Read Write Own, Chris Dixon, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz
I’ll reiterate what I wrote at the beginning: crypto is objectively better in every way for the customer. It has no maintenance windows, no middle man, no outages like a traditional payment provider, and is near-instantaneous in and out. It’s ubiquitous globally, solving one of the biggest challenges for global scale as an operator, being the country-by-country solutioning of payment providers. And for the regulators, as well as operators, despite many misconceptions, it is more transparent, easier to track, and therefore analyze than a fiat transaction.
It should be clear by now that the customer success this technology enables, when deployed effectively, is unmatched. And improved customer success is something that operators and regulators can align on (or certainly should). By operating from this lens, and acknowledging that it can work within a gambling regulatory framework (it already exists in some), crypto and web3 technologies become an enabler, and way to win, not a boogeyman.
Rivalry Token, and a deeper crypto payment experience that simultaneously went live today, along with a variety of user experience adjustments (I can’t give it all away), is how we are more decisively playing the game to win. It improves our competitive position by further embracing this technology and its associated customer success gains, while not crossing lines of legality as a regulated operator, that’s also publicly traded, and one with certain standards we hold ourselves to.
It compliments who we already are, addressing a community Rivalry neighbors and understands as a brand that speaks to the intrinsic ‘gamba’ of the internet. We are steeped in internet culture, fluent in memes and sarcasm, having once been described as “watching the movie sausage party on acid.” The venn diagram of Gen Z, gamblers, gamers, and crypto enthusiasts or crypto curious has an extremely high degree of overlap. We are uniquely positioned for this.
Beyond all that, it moves the needle on solving something we have been thinking deeply about since launching Rivalry in late 2018, which is enabling more positive alignment between us and our user base. This is core to the ethos and technical promise of Web3. Achieving non-zero-sum alignment, through a token, to any degree in online gambling would be powerful.
I’m not here saying this is a silver bullet, nothing is, but we are in the ‘arena’ trying shit. Behind the silly nut jokes and irreverent brand is deep strategic thinking, informed by acute observation, a techno-optimist lens, and delivered with high craft to a generation on the internet that we believe we understand better than anyone else. That is Rivalry.
