True Flip Interview: What Future Has in Store for Cryptocurrency Gambling

True Flip, a Blockchain-powered online gaming platform is nearing the end of its month-long ICO. The company aims to leverage Blockchain tech to bring the long-promised transparency and fairness to the cryptocurrency gambling market at large.

Cryptocurrency gambling has been and remains one of the key drivers of growth of the Blockchain market as a whole. Cointelegraph has reached out to True Flip’s team to talk about the problems that currently exist in this sphere, how can they be solved, and what awaits the industry in the future.

Cointelegraph: What are the key issues with cryptocurrency gambling today? If the Blockchain tech offers such an obvious solution to many of the transparency and fairness problems, why has no gaming platform based on it really taken off yet?

True Flip: The primary issues in cryptocurrency gambling today are finding the payment solutions for the unregulated gaming markets and provably fair technologies that can replace third-party audit firms like eCOGRA.

Cryptocurrencies with large market share and liquid markets - like Bitcoin - are an ideal solution for businesses operating in gaming markets that would not typically be serviced by credit cards or other legacy payment systems.

The provably fair technologies will eventually mature and make headway into the mainstream gaming and casino markets, but they haven't done that yet because the mainstream operators are fat and happy with the leadership positions that they already enjoy so they do not see a need to adopt new tech.

The small challenger operators will be the ones to introduce this new type of tech. And it’s going be a long journey for everyone involved, full of rises and falls. And the winning solutions will be brought by competitive business setups and the management’s abilities to make the right decisions and rapidly implement them with no loss in overall product quality – just as in any other business.

Cointelegraph: Have your team members worked on any successful Blockchain-based projects before?

TF: Well, we won't call ourselves Blockchain gurus like some of the guys who have been in the industry for ages. Nevertheless, we do have some solid background in Blockchain startups, as well as prominent achievements and careers built in web development, IT, marketing and e-commerce.

That experience has turned out to be enough to, first of all, shape a powerful team behind True Flip which includes crypto architects, business developers, an absolutely stunning advisory board, and so on.

Frankly, as we were getting deeper knowledge of this market during last year, it became clear, that the biggest issues here are located in the field of business processes management. That means that just having an interesting and innovative product won’t be enough to win the game; you’ve got to have a good team on the ground too.

Cointelegraph: Let’s hear more about True Flip’s platform. How is it different from competitors?

TF: At the time of our launch this market was surprisingly weak, crowded with many small projects with no MVP or at least comprehensible business strategy. We clearly understood that our team members do have a perfectly suitable experience for launching a product of a higher level, compared to what the market can offer.

So, probably, our main difference now is that True Flip is already a viable and running business. We've gone much beyond the roadmap-only stage when many companies try crowdfunding just to make things work – True Flip already has over 100,000 registered players, with thousands of them playing daily.

We have a long history of wins and payouts and our main goal today is not launching a business, but scaling an already existing one – unlike most of the projects in our niche.

Cointelegraph: Tell us a secret! What is the most non-obvious feature of True Flip?

TF: Oh yes, there is one. It’s Flip the Dolphin, our mascot. Maybe the least obvious feature of True Flip is that we try to stay personal with our audience.

What we wanted from the very beginning was not to launch yet another multi-million crowdsale and become 10 times more wealthy. We’ve decided to transfer the experience of a traditional gamble to the provably fair Blockchain environment.

We wanted our players to feel comfortable using a superbly innovative product, with no need to get used to its back-end details. Blockchain and IT are just what makes the whole thing work in accordance with the original idea. At the same time, many efforts are made to keep gameplay, design and marketing habitual for people who appreciate a good gamble.

So probably the non-obvious thing with our platform is that we’ve actually established a real lottery business, where people buy tickets and play – not an ICO-purposed hype which “brings the brightest prospects to those who understand.”

To make it clear, we’re aimed at a very traditional point of substantial growth in this business, namely at selling more tickets. And we’re not keen on financing the results of a deeply theoretical research which has unclear perspectives.

Cointelegraph: Let’s say your project succeeds and becomes the new standard of how a fair and transparent gaming platform should operate. What do you think the next biggest innovation on the gambling market will be?

TF: To tell the truth, we don't think there's any space left for game changing advances in this field except those associated with the Blockchain. Lotteries didn't face any major changes for literally centuries before the Blockchain era.

Gambling is a very conservative environment in general, so you can easily track all the U-turns in its history. Usually, they happen in close connection with huge technological breakthroughs, like the emergence of the Internet or even electricity itself.

So further innovation – unless any unexpected scenarios take place – will mostly be done in the details of how things in the industry get done. This concerns most of nowadays issues including transparency and verifiability of back-end processes and the games’ results, as well as providing additional independence of gambling-related businesses from any third party or national governments.

In this regard, the probable changes in national legal frameworks should be mentioned, of course, as these are one of the key drivers - or detriments - in the current gambling paradigm. But that’s a matter of politics, not innovation.

Cointelegraph: And finally let’s touch upon the ICO market. What’s your opinion on all the hype surrounding it? Is the current rapid growth a good or a bad thing?

TF: The ICO market is fascinating, and while it is currently the killer app for Ethereum, it is not unreasonable to see future ICO's launched as smart contracts on the Bitcoin network using Bitcoin's native scripting language.

ICOs are disruptive to existing capital markets because they eliminate several gatekeepers and choke points while at the same time forming an entirely new and parallel ecosystem for rapid growth, seemingly immune to jurisdictional boundaries.