Decentralised Gambling: The York Combined Transaction Set

Abstract

This paper describes the York Combined Transaction Set (YCTS), which offers a single consolidated list of publicly available gambling related transactions derived from the Ethereum blockchain. This data includes over 1.4M individual transactions across 17,000+ unique addresses, which represent spending on decentralised gambling smart contracts. These contracts, and corresponding applications, have been selected based on their popularity as presented by an officially recognised ranking service, and have transacted over £240M by naive estimation over the past 10 months. Given the historical opacity of data driven gambling research, our contribution is to identify, and make available in a simple form, the transaction data found on the Ethereum blockchain such that existing questions surrounding player spending can be explored, and differences between decentralised and traditional forms of gambling can be identified.

Decentralised Gambling Overview

“…Decentralised gambling currently takes a number of forms. Most typically it includes simple casino games like dice rolls, coin flips, and other games of chance [3], although more advanced games like poker and blackjack are available. These games can be played by accessing the website part of the decentralised gambling application through a web browser.…”