NFT Wagering

By Drew Kasch

NFT iGaming is poised to explode spectacularly.  Unlike roleplaying games, iGaming specifically involves wagering on the outcome of probability games such as fantasy sports, prediction markets, poker, stock market trading, digital racing, and casino-style games. Major operators in this space are beginning to incorporate customer-owned digital assets known as NFTs into their environment. Not every platform is doing it right, but the ones which are represent one of the most attractive gaming opportunities you will encounter in your lifetime.
 
There's a reason "blockchain engineer" is suddenly the highest-paying career IT students can train for. The burgeoning Web3 culture is unstoppable, whether we are ready for it or not. If you have a proper grasp on what this revolution is about, you can position yourself now for extracting a worthwhile income as a smart end-user in the next big trend: NFT wagering.
 
What's radically different about the new landscape is the fact it is the end-user who stands to benefit every bit as much as the operators, thanks largely to the Web3 construct of necessitating distributed consumer ownership of assets. Simpler put: when you own a piece of the action, it's easier to win.
 
Now combine that with the fact these new platforms are populated with unskilled players, many of whom are there for "metaverse" experiences, play-to-earn tokenomics (including being staked), or pure digital asset speculation, and you have a formula for the best-stocked fish pond since the early days of online poker. In fact there has never been anything like this, because a widely-fluctuating secondary market for digital asset trading is also tied in.
 
Drew Kasch's latest book will prep you for being a shark ready to feed in the new pond. Whether you are already a probability game sharpie and just need acclimation to Web3 tokenomics, or are active in crypto communities but lack solid iGaming strategies, or even if you need both – the following pages will equip you for mining your share of the next great internet gold rush, which is just now ramping up to speed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Drew Kasch
• Release date: Jan 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215130315

Book preview

Introduction to NFT iGaming & Utility NFTs

How many times have you said to yourself, If only I’d gotten in on… fill in the blank. Hindsight is always 20:20, right? We’d all be rolling in it by now if we’d just known about such and such early enough.

Don’t kick yourself. The truth is the future success of most of those past things was difficult to foresee. Many required incurring significant risk, monetary or otherwise. Home-run opportunities in developing technologies have always been speculative.

Until now. What is about to happen in the NFT Gaming (also known as GameFi) space is darn near unstoppable. By now there is already a large and voracious customer base which stampedes to the latest crypto game regardless of any factors other than it being cool-looking. Venture capitalists and technology developers have taken serious note of this. As we speak, the pieces are being put in place for the next phase of this particular subculture to explode spectacularly, leaving fresh multi-millionaires in its inescapable wake. That next phase will be iGaming, or to put it another way, NFT wagering.

By virtue of holding this book in your hands you are positioned to profit nicely from the situation, and may well find yourself able to make a full-time living as nothing more than a smart player – assuming, of course, that you follow through and actually become a smart player, rather than just another sideline spectator. What I am about to present is a rare, once-in-a-lifetime scenario unfolding. Utility NFTs have rightfully been identified by a number of experts, including industry analysts, IT professors, and venture capitalists, as the next big thing. A sizable number of NFT gamers are going to make bank in the next few years. This includes end-users like you and me, not just developers and project stakeholders.

In fact, end-users are who everything is being structured to benefit, every bit as much as the investors and entrepreneurs who are building the Web3 ecosystem where the new class of digital assets lives and thrives. The burgeoning Web3 culture is one which fully understands the necessity of consumer ownership to make it all work. In order to play in this game, you are going to have to own a piece of the action. It’s that simple, it’s critical to the ecosystem, and it’s brilliant.

Unsurprisingly, governments around the world have been scrambling to figure out how they can undermine decentralized digital assets. Rest assured their reach here is limited, as the entire point of decentralized is to prevent such a thing. So instead, the world’s major economies will soon be converting their monetary systems to central bank digital currencies in an effort to offer a safe-appearing alternative to cryptocurrency which is, naturally, centralized and under governmental control. This is already in the works, and several countries have already rolled theirs out.

It is during this transitional phase, over the next decade or so, when fortunes large and small will be made by ordinary people who place their liquid assets and/or time resources into the right things at the right time. It is my firm opinion that one of those right things is NFT iGaming, and the right time is now – or will be very shortly. You are going to be able to make money as both a player and a casual investor in this space. So why not do both?

Some of you reading this have an existing level of knowledge on blockchains, crypto, and NFTs. Others of you don’t. It is my goal to write to both groups, while avoiding too much rehashing of a basic education on how all this works. But we will have to go over it at least briefly to get everyone on the same page. For now, suffice it to say that a utility NFT is a functional digital asset as opposed to digital asset which is merely collectable. A functional digital asset is meant to be used in some way. It has utility; a purpose, such as a game piece or token required for playing a game.

If you’ve read any of my other books on beating probability games, you know I place a heavy emphasis on specific strategies based on game theory. This text will follow the same protocol. It’s not enough to be able to grasp the environment. We need a game plan custom-tailored to it. Fortunately, beating a financial game for an expected profit is easier when you own pieces of the game which have a constantly-exchangeable value. I’m telling you, this landscape is a dream-come-true for savvy players. There is just one heck of a lot of gold to be mined.

We can thank RPG (roleplaying) games which utilize NFTs for laying the foundation of our new iGaming opportunities, and especially for gifting us with proof of concept. Those games (for the most part) reside outside the focus of this text, but not because there isn’t a potential income to be made from them. As a matter of fact, populations of players in low-income locales such as the Philippines are already making a full-time living from roleplaying NFT games. How, you ask? By actively participating in a tokenomics system where digital assets are created and distributed among the players, and where enough interest is continually generated to sustain a real-world exchangeable value for those assets. Whether this is a temporary fad or even an elaborate Ponzi-scheme is yet to be seen. For now, regardless of any outcome, it is very real.

My forte is beating probability games that are played for money. Roleplaying games incorporating utility NFTs are great, but deriving an income from them is more like work than gaming, once you learn the most profitable actions to endlessly repeat. Also, the reliability of that income is questionable because it is based on the sustained value of a platform’s native currency (or tokens), and that value exists purely from the free market forces of perception, supply, and demand. It is also worth considering that the element of chance in these games is usually not identifiable by the player, who is always at the mercy of the algorithm (and latest algorithm updates).

Contrast that to a well-known probability game such as sports betting, poker, horse racing, stock market speculation, prediction markets wagering, or your favorite casino game. Here you at least roughly know the odds, even if you concede that you are technically taking the worst of it. These are easy propositions to appraise the value