Gambling is one of humanity’s favorite pastimes. Archaeological evidence suggests that people have been gambling since at least the Stone Age – using knucklebone dice – and the range of games of chance throughout recorded history is as rich and varied as human culture itself. The advent of the internet created a whole new market for the industry, and the COVID-19 lockdown led to a significant rise in the popularity of online gambling – the industry is expected to bring in approximately $48 billion worldwide in 2021 alone. 
Source: Kolby, Flickr
At the same time, there are issues with online gaming – opacity, fraud, intrusive KYC checks. These are issues that blockchain technology solves in one fell swoop. In addition, it creates new money-making opportunities for players, making the industry lucrative for a much wider range of people. In this article, we’ll look at a few of the most popular gambling-focused tokens and what they do.Join Kirobo’s Channels & Stay Updated Telegram | Discord
VPP
VPP is the native token of Virtue Poker, the only blockchain-based poker platform regulated by the Malta Gaming Authority. This online arena is built on the Ethereum blockchain and takes advantage of blockchain technology to ensure fairness and safety for players.Source: Pixabay
Shuffling One of the issues of online poker is trust in the shuffle. If you’re playing in person, you can observe the dealer shuffling the deck and feel confident that the shuffle was truly random. But how can you be sure that a shuffle is fair when there’s no real deck of cards? You’re entirely dependent on the operator and its algorithm. Virtue Poker has come up with an ingenious solution – allowing all players to participate in the shuffle. Player one shuffles the virtual deck with the Virtue Poker app and then encrypts the deck order, locking it. Then player two does the same, followed by player three. This means that there are multiple stages of layers of encryption, ensuring a truly random shuffle and making it nigh-on impossible to hack the deck. In addition, players share their encryption keys, so everyone can check that the shuffle was above board when the game is concluded. Safety deposit Gambling sites require players to leave a deposit. However, for the player, this always has an element of risk. Is the operator trustworthy? What if the operator is hacked? What can be done if your money is stolen? Blockchain technology solves this issue by keeping player deposits in a smart contract that releases payouts only when certain conditions are met. This is the best way to enforce fair play, without risk of corruption or error. Dealers In the Virtue Poker ecosystem, nodes can be designated as ‘Justices’ if they hold a sufficient amount of VPP. In return for adjudicating and validating, they are rewarded with VPP taken from transaction fees. This incentivizes participation in the system, driving up the price of VPP, as well as providing a fairness guarantee. At the time of writing, VPP has a market cap of approx. $9.1 million and daily trading volume of approx. $1.4 million.CHP
Coinpoker is another poker platform powered by blockchain technology. It has a mobile app, a thriving community, and is compatible with ETH, BTC and USDT. The nature of blockchain transactions means that all deposits by players are visible to all, and this is a key pillar of the company’s philosophy – disrupting the industry by offering an alternative to the opaque giants that control online poker. The shuffle Traditionally, online poker companies kept their shuffling algorithms secret for security reasons (i.e. to prevent reverse-engineering the shuffle and learning the order of the deck), but this secrecy meant that players would never be sure that a piece of remarkable luck was really the result of remarkable luck. With Coinpoker, decks are shuffled in a decentralized manner, by the players. Each player sends a ‘shake value’ to Coinpoker, which produces from them a final shake value. The multiple layers of randomness mean that the shuffle is impossible to reverse-engineer. After a hand is played, the players can view the shake values in order to verify that all was fair.Source: Val D’Aquila, Flickr
In addition, the platform allows players to review undealt cards after a hand is finished. This ability to review decisions is valuable to players who want to analyze their performance after a game is over. Referral program and bounty CoinPoker gives people the opportunity to earn extra money by bringing in new players. To qualify, they have to bring a minimum of two referrals, and those two referrals need to earn at least 2 USDT each. In these cases, the referring party takes 30% of the community contributions from each. These rewards continue as long as the referrals continue playing. In addition, the platform has an open offer to any developer who can locate a bug or weakness in the platform’s code: 1,000,000 CHP. The platform also offers a crypto-based sportsbook covering sports like football, hockey, basketball, baseball, and American football. At the time of writing, CHP has a market cap of approx. $3.6 million and daily trading volume of approx. $11,650.FUN
This ERC-20 token has had an interesting history. It was created by FunFair, a Singapore-based decentralized gambling platform, and its ICO back in 2017 made $26 million in only four hours. The FUN token was designed to be lightweight, which is as attractive to operators as it is to players because it cuts overheads. To achieve this it uses ‘fate channels’ which take play off-blockchain. However, the token suffered during the post-2017 crypto bear run, and its value flatlined until it was acquired by online gambling giant FreeBitco.in. FreeBitco.in. is one of the world’s largest online casinos with more than 50 million monthly visits. The company uses Bitcoin for gambling, but now accepts the FUN token for premium users. FUN users receive benefits like cashback, free spins, a referral program, and more.Source: Wikipedia
One of the elements encouraging use of FUN is that FreeBitco.in encourages users to lock their tokens on the platform in return for interest on top of the aforementioned benefits. At the time of writing, FUN has a market cap of approx. $212.6 million and daily trading volume of approx. $14 million.