FunFair: Blockchain technology for online casinos
FunFair co-founder Jez San explains what FunFair is and how it's helping online casinos.
Mr San sat down with Crypto Finder to discuss what exactly FunFair does for online casinos and how they are bringing trust back to online gambling.
Interview from Blockchain Week London, 23 January 2018.
Read the transcript:
I'm Jezz San. I'm one of the founders of FunFair which is a gaming technology company based in London.
FunFair has created technology that empowers casino operators to offer a fair game. So it's powered by the blockchain and smart contracts, and it's the first time that we've been able to build a casino gaming system – a platform that literally runs on the blockchain and doesn't require any servers.
One of the problems we're solving is the trust problem that many players don't want to trust leaving money in a casino or believe that they're going to be cheated. And even though the cases of people actually being cheated is very low, because there is a trust issue, the market is limited in its size by the number of people willing to participate in it.
So we believe by creating technology that guarantees a fair game and also does it very efficiently so that casino operators have good margins, we believe that we can have an expanded market, we believe we can offer the player benefits, the operator benefits; even the regulators and affiliates get something out of it.
And how does your technology do that?
Firstly we've built the games to run in smart contracts on the blockchain and then we've also built a scaling technology that we call "fate channels". And that allows transactions to run really fast, which allows players to play games at the speed that is fun.
Because right now, the blockchain is quite slow and can be overloaded at times and that wouldn't be a fun experience for players if the games they played were slowed down by the blockchain. So we have technology that takes the games off chain which lets them run really fast and then goes back to the chain to do settlement.
So what is your transaction rate?
We can do thousands of transactions a second and it could scale much faster than that. And it does that by opening the transaction on the blockchain and bringing deposits onto the blockchain, and then it can play as many games as it wants off chain and then it goes back to the blockchain to settle. So there's really no limit to the number of transactions per second, and this is all running on today's Ethereum. We're not waiting for a future version, it runs today on our website FunFair.io.
