In an exclusive interview, Crypto expert Felix Roemer predicts Litecoin & Bitcoin will both spike in the next year.
The founder of Crypto Casino portal Gamdom.com told Bitcoin Casinos that ChatGPT & AI coins are all ‘hype’ in the Crypto space. Whilst divulging his top 2 tips for starting a Crypto Casino.
If you would like to use any of the quotes from this interview, please credit and link to https://www.bitcoincasinos.com
- ChatGPT & AI Coins in Crypto is all hype
- Litecoin will spike this year
- Crypto traders enjoy using profits for sports betting
- Crypto regulators already cracking down on staking
- Bitcoin will break all-time highs after next halving
- Exchanges are too risky – comparable with stuffing money under your sofa
- 1000x leverage by Rollbit was a great idea
- Top 2 tips for starting a Crypto Casino. Do something new & don’t use a provider
Transcript
Q: Background in crypto and of Gamdom.com?
Felix Roemer (FR): Before I started with Gamdom in 2016, I was already investing in JustDice in 2013 and I was dealing a bunch with the guys from BitFinex and I also invested in BitFinex in 2016.
From then on I built a site together with a friend of mine and that was Gamdom, but it wasn’t a casino as it is today it was a gamified CS:GO skin casino because that was a thing back then until the makers of the game decided to not allow it anymore. They didn’t do it as directly as that but it was because of the gambling and then we had a choice whether to switch to a completely fun gambling site or to make a crypto casino. Given from what I knew it was easier to switch to being a crypto casino and that turned out to be a good decision.
Q: How will Gamdom grow in the next few years?
FR: There is lots of regulation coming and it’s about adapting to it, getting licenses, I hope there will be local licenses that are crypto-friendly in the future, that understand cryptocurrency and want to work with casinos like us. I think if that is happening then the future is pretty bright, it will make it easier for customers, more verifiable, for example, no withdrawal limits like you get with other casinos and deposit restrictions from banks and so on, so it makes it much easier for players.
Q: SEC cracking down in the US, how might that affect your growth going forward?
FR: I think what they are mainly trying to crack down on, following the FTX debacle, what Sam Bankman-Fried was able to pull off so well was because he incentivized people to deposit more and more through aggressive staking programmes and he did that all the way from the start when he launched the exchange. I think what the US regulator is trying to do is basically just crack down on the APY (annualized percentage yield) promises from the different staking programs to make sure there are no gaps that can be used by some entity to grow itself with customer funds.
Q: Kraken was fined and Coinbase CEO tweeted about staking on the platform not being a CEO
FR: Yes, they are both very open about it and very direct to the government always and always on Twitter, both the Kraken and Coinbase CEOs.
Q: Huge interest and surge in AI tech and AI crypto. Any future for AI in crypto casinos?
FR: I’m still figuring out what that would be, I’m experimenting quite a bit with ChatGPT. As you’ve seen with coins when things are first starting, there are going to be 99% that don’t work out and then there’s maybe one good idea that will stick around, but for now, I would call it a lot of hype.
Q: How have you been personally using ChatGPT?
FR: Sometimes it’s just about formulating complicated questions, where you really want to get a dedicated answer and ChatGPT is great for that. Sometimes it’s just been asking random things just to see what it says. I’m only two weeks into it but very curious about what else can be done because this is just the first real breakthrough that we’ve seen in a long time and I think it will advance from that.
Q: Are you a crypto trader/investor, do you have favourite coins?
FR: I have some favourite coins, Bitcoin is always one coin that everyone goes back to when things hit the fan and it has proven itself to be the most reliable, although the returns are not as great anymore, so that’s still one of my favourites. Another one is actually Litecoin, most people use it for gambling, even though it is a coin that gets overlooked a lot, it is actually a coin that’s very, very usable for transactions and payments. It has naturally developed into it without really big influencers or entities pushing it and I really like something that’s not influenced a lot.
Q: Litecoin specifically?
FR: It’s very usable, the transaction speed is nice, the transaction speed is good. It also has halvenings, like Bitcoin, and the next one is actually coming up this year and that usually boosts the price every time it happens. When everything else is quiet there’s a Litecoin pump once every four years.
Q: After the extended bear market, where might the crypto markets be in the next year or two?
FR: If I’m predicting really long-term then I’m always with Bitcoin, I think we’ll break new all-time highs once the next halvening happens and people get interested again in that. Especially since there was some government interest last time, I think that’s going to come more and more, especially with the first and second world splitting more and more and the US dollar coming.
Q: How have you seen crypto adoption increase in your industry and what will it take to get to mass adoption?
FR: I’ve seen constant growth and adoption and new users that actually understand what crypto is is constantly growing. Looking at page views and trends, even though the price has been declining there are so many new businesses popping up. The thing that has really slowed crypto a lot – and it only lasted two weeks – was the FTX [collapse]. People were even coming into our live chats asking if we knew anyone at FTX that could help get their money out.
Q: Negative headlines are also going to make people think twice about investing/adopting
FR: It’s also risky because we put everything into people’s own hands [eg with exchanges]. It’s not directly comparable to stashing all your money in your home under your sofa but if you talk to people online and they[re showing off their crypto assets, then [bad actors] are going to wonder if they can steal them somehow. It’s very viewable and even though you can protect your assets pretty well people are going to find a way to trick you or hack you.
Q: Twitch banned streaming on crypto gambling, has that affected you much?
FR: They have banned a handful of websites but they haven’t banned us, perhaps because we have responsible gambling measures, we weren;t trying to get gaming streamers onto a slot section, maybe that spared us. It was something we were expecting, Stake was going very hard on Twitch and at the point where Drake came on Twitch… I think Twitch even shadow-banned Drake’s streams so he wouldn’t be visible all over Twitch and that’s what made them ready for any bad PR out there, they are just going to ban it.
Q: Rollbit getting lot of traction on Twitter, gambling with 1000x leverage. Thoughts on that and how that compares?
FR: Rollbit is nice, they have their own native token (RB) and with the token you can basically stake into the lottery that they have on the website which is basically funded by some casino profits. Every time you go in and stake your coins, 50% are burned and it really makes RB a scarce asset. So a lot of people are hyped because finally there were enough tokens burned that the demand pumped. The 1000x leverage is pretty cool because it’s technically very hard to build something with 1000x leverage, I think there was some pushback from the US government, I remember at some point some platforms had to go down from 100x to 20x. I think it might be risky in that regard but the feature is pretty cool.
Q: Is that something you might offer in the future?
FR: I think what differentiates us from Rollbit is that we solely focus on the casino aspect, creating a better product for the simple casino niche. Rollbit is a lot about innovating and getting new features out there.
Q: New crypto casino Lucky Block – what tips would you have, difficulties you ran into or unexpected or went better than expected?
FR: I think the main mistake that people make when they start accepting crypto is that they do it through some sort of provider, where you basically have limits and then deposit in and have an invoice, most players don’t want to do that. That would be the number 1 tip. The number 2 tip would be to do something new, a lot of crypto casinos are popping up and if you have a unique feature or something others don’t have to set yourself apart. I would say 90% of the casinos that are launching right now all look the same so, there’s definitely a need for innovation.
Q: Any crossover between crypto trading and casino playing or is it more traditional gamers are selecting crypto casinos over online ones?
FR: I think where crypto trading and casinos overlap is with sports betting, because it’s a similar skill. A lot of people are interested in that and whenever we see people trading on other platforms and we do trading they are usually converting into being sport bettors and they coordinate bets. A lot of people doing sports betting are long-term profitable and doing it because of experiences they had maybe on other sports, or what they learned from trading like bankroll management.
Q: Were you an online casino gamer before getting into the crypto side?
FR: It’s a bit of a weird story, I actually first got into gambling through Runescape and they used to have, in about 2011, some dice packs and if you rolled the pack and it was over 60 you would double your payout so I was running casino games in that game, pretty much when I was a kid. You would get Gold from Runescape and you could sell that, at first in PayPal and then from 2013 with Bitcoin and that’s how I got into Bitcoin as well.
Q: More regulations coming on Twitch and other streaming platforms?
FR: I feel right now there’s not that much activity to crack down on. What I see a lot is like view-bot streams where people just get 500 viewers and then run a 12 hour video of gambling activity and I think they are going to crack down on that because that gets reported a lot.
Q: Crypto advertisements and sponsorships to grow?
FR: From what I’m seeing right now, crypto companies are not on as big of a budget, I think that will be a thing again the next time there is hype. I’m pretty sure there will be, I think we’ve seen enough cycles now to know that there will be another. I’m curious to know what the next hype will be, maybe it will be AI coins.
Q: Kieran Gibbs paid half his salary in Bitcoin and generally athletes paid salary in Bitcoin – good or bad idea?
FR: It depends if he saves the other part of the money that he’s not getting paid in Bitcoin, because we might be in for a ride before we really know what the US government decides with crypto regulations. With what we are seeing right now they are taking a quite executing approach to crypto, they are not very easygoing right now. In general, I feel lhat Bitcoin is on the low end so it might not be quite that bad.
Q: NFTs bad year in 2022, has the bubble already burst?
FR: The very interesting part that is happening right now is all the projects that have actually built a community where they really have the exclusivity aspect going and have events for their holders are the very interesting ones and are going up in value. I feel like the main problem, especially with adoption for the mainstream, is that it has been so memed with the copy and paste your profile picture that it’s very hard to explain to people how NFTs actually work without seeing them as really silly right away.
Q: Anything we’ve not spoken about?
FR: There’s going to be a completely new version of our website. We’ve been building it for two years, with a full UI/UX revamp, new games and coming up soon. I hope it will be live this month, but it could be later. I think it will probably go into March because we are doing a lot of testing and want to make sure everything is smooth.
