The 1st quarter of 2019 was tapered. One of the reasons, for sure, was a holiday season that chopped productivity time from both ourselves and our stakeholders; secondly, we awaited approval of banking and merchant accounts that already stretched us too far. As a result, we concentrated further on in-house R&D, optimizing the code and solving non-trivial problems with sportsbook integration that we could not foresee.
Bank Account & Merchant
The reason why opening a banking and merchant accounts took that much time became apparent at the beginning of February when the Wirecard’s fraud leaked out. Yet, the good finally is that just a week ago we got the preliminary approval for opening accounts and compliance instructions to put our site in good order.
SportsBetting
In December of 2018, we firmly believed that the sportsbook integration was almost ready to go in production. However, it didn’t work out for us as we faced quite unexpected issues during the test period. Namely, we found out that the results of certain events after going through settlement cutoff could be canceled, which is, of course, normal and often expected. What was not expected is the timeframe during which it may happen — so, we saw cases when the results got canceled after 4 hours from the settlement. As you can imagine, the time lag of such magnitude exposes BitDice casino to some significant risks related to our ability to instantly pay out clients and/or process withdrawals. On top of this problem, we have encountered the other one connected with rounding of wager amounts to decimal numbers denominated in and ETH. So, taking into account the vendor’s pitfalls and overloaded interface, we are planning to refrain from a turnkey solution and start providing our own interface and event settlement book by linking data-feed only.
By overcoming a large number of issues, we expect to roll out sports betting for all the players in a week or two.
Site & Design
We continue to improve the stability of the platform and debug the code. The decision to re-design the website was uneasy. We have spent a great deal of time outlining how we shall approach and position ourselves given our multi-faceted business (crypto and old-style casino along with sports betting). In addition, we keep on considering the optimal way to empower smart contracts and make them fully compliant with regulators.
If among players, there are any experts in gambling space, BitDice will be happy to hear out your opinion on how we could better position our products in the market.
R&D
At the moment, technology-wise we contemplate two viable options for further direction: 1) Lightning Network — we have set up our own node and the one, who first finds it, will get some prize. 2) Engaging with smart contracts.
We have studied intensively the capabilities of the language. At the moment we are not ready to offer a pure Dice wager on smart contracts as we think the risk of losing the entire bankroll is still very high. What we are mostly after at this point, is to incorporate the smart contracts logic for automating verification and payouts processes.
LN
We keep in the plans the possibility to deposit and withdraw funds via LN as the technology proves to be quite stable so far. Both solutions were tested (clightning and lnd) and we made up our mind to use the latter one. We have also discussed the possibility of creating the light version of Dice for the LN, but we are not yet sure there will be demand for this version.
Published at Fri, 08 Mar 2019 14:08:13 +0000
