Inside the decentralised casino: A longitudinal study of actual cryptocurrency gambling transactions

Abstract

Decentralised gambling applications are a new way for people to gamble online. Decentralised gambling applications are distinguished from traditional online casinos in that players use cryptocurrency as a stake. Also, rather than being stored on a single centralised server, decentralised gambling applications are stored on a cryptocurrency’s blockchain. Previous work in the player behaviour tracking literature has examined the spending profiles of gamblers on traditional online casinos. However, similar work has not taken place in the decentralised gambling domain. The profile of gamblers on decentralised gambling applications are therefore unknown. This paper explores 2,232,741 transactions from 24,234 unique addresses to three such applications operating atop the Ethereum cryptocurrency network over 583 days. We present spending profiles across these applications, providing the first detailed summary of spending behaviours in this technologically advanced domain. We find that the typical player spends approximately $110 equivalent across a median of 6 bets in a single day, although heavily involved bettors spend approximately $100,000 equivalent over a median of 644 bets across 35 days. Our findings suggest that the average decentralised gambling application player spends less than in other online casinos overall, but that the most heavily involved players in this new domain spend substantially more. This study also demonstrates the use of these applications as a research platform, specifically for large scale longitudinal in-vivo data analysis.

The psychology of cryptocurrency trading: Risk and protective factors

“…Coins are traded on exchanges, stored privately in wallets using "keys" or identifiers. 2 Increasingly, they can be used in tokenised economies to pay for games, to gamble, to pay for commodities, for producing work (e.g., Anytask and Electroneum) or secure contracts (smart contracts, Chainlink) and to coordinate supply chains (e.g., VeChain) or as currency (Reserve Rights or BTC) (Gainsbury & Blaszczynki, 2017;Scholten, Zendle, & Walker, 2020).…”

Safer gambling and consumer protection failings among 40 frequently visited cryptocurrency-based online gambling operators.

“…The fast growth of cryptocurrency-based gambling means that research on this topic is limited. In only a few years, the sector started from a largely theoretical possibility (Gainsbury & Blaszczynski, 2017), before producing a limited number of stylized games for a limited number of tech-savvy gamblers (Scholten et al, 2020(Scholten et al, , 2019. Today, the latest generation of sophisticated cryptocurrencybased gambling operators can offer almost as wide a range of gambling opportunities as can be found via more established forms of online gambling (Figure 1 shows example screenshots of This document is copyrighted by the American Psychological Association or one of its allied publishers.…”

“…From 2011, other newer cryptocurrency “coins,” termed Altcoins, were released and achieved varying degrees of success; some were based on the same algorithm as Bitcoin, while others (e.g., Litecoin) promised more advantages, such as speed and more anonymity (Yadav et al, 2022). Currently, cryptocurrencies are traded on exchanges as speculative assets; to pay for products and services; and to gamble (Delfabbro, King, & Williams, 2021; Scholten et al, 2020). In the United Kingdom, 4.4% of adults currently hold cryptocurrencies, up from 3.9% in 2020 (Financial Conduct Authority, 2021a).…”

Safer Gambling and Consumer Protection Failings Among 40 Frequently Visited Cryptocurrency-Based Online Gambling Operators

“…From 2011, other newer cryptocurrency 'coins', termed Altcoins, were released and achieved varying degrees of success; some were based on the same algorithm as Bitcoin, while others (e.g., Litecoin) promised more advantages, such as speed and more anonymity (Yadav et al, 2020). Currently, cryptocurrencies are traded on exchanges as speculative assets; to pay for products and services; and to gamble (Scholten, Zendle & Walker, 2020;). In the UK, 4.4% of adults currently hold cryptocurrencies, up from 3.9% in 2020 (Financial Conduct Authority, 2021a).…”

“…The fast growth of cryptocurrency-based gambling means that research on this topic is limited. In only a few years, the sector started from a largely theoretical possibility (Gainsbury & Blaszczynski, 2017), before producing a limited number of stylised games for a limited number of tech-savvy gamblers (Scholten et al, 2019;Scholten, Zendle & Walker, 2020). Today, the latest generation of sophisticated cryptocurrency-based gambling operators can offer almost as wide a range of gambling opportunities as can be found via more established forms of online gambling (Figure 1 shows example screenshots of cryptocurrency-based gambling operators).…”