Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Today, we were lucky enough to talk to Mal Teser, who is the founder and co-owner of the new crypto casino VLW.Bet. In this interview, Mal shares the biggest challenges he faced on the way to launching an online casino and gives us a sneak peek at how a crypto casino works from the inside.Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Special thanks to the users of the BitcoinTalk forum who helped to compile the questions for this conversation.Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
First of all, thank you for the opportunity. I’m a 45-year-old Portuguese guy who’s been living abroad for the last 20 years and working in the iGaming industry since 2006. I started with an entry-level job and worked my way up to a CEO position for an International Game software company.Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
When I left my last job in July 2022 I took some time to think about the next step, and I am a big crypto afficionado so I really believed in the merge of crypto and gaming.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
To me, the biggest struggle was finding the right platform and service providers. It’s hard to figure out who really delivers a good product and service without testing them out. Even though I am an experienced industry professional, it still took me a year of research to put all the pieces together. Today, I also provide help to other gaming startup founders as a consultant so they don’t have to navigate those waters blindly.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
It depends on a lot of factors, but I would say the bare minimum to technically launch it would be around $100k, and if you include operational and other expenses for a short term, then it will probably take you $300k to $500k (not considering staff ).
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We spent most on setting up the site itself, the team, and affiliate marketing.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Yeah, we have a small group of business angels who are part of my professional and personal network. It was a very natural process. They were following my career and jumped at the opportunity when they heard I was starting my own brand. Right now, we are actively fund-raising and looking for more investors to scale up the business and expand.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Right now, we have around 20 people working on the project in one way or another.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We are still a relatively new brand, so we’re definitely in the beginning stages yet. It’s hard to get visibility in such a competitive market and get your brand out in the world to get noticed by players.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Dealing with 3rd parties. There are still a lot of amateur people in our industry, especially now with сrypto. There’s a whole generation of сrypto enthusiasts that just parachuted into iGaming and didn’t know what it takes to make something work (besides a bag of coins).
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We try to adopt all the best practices both internally and towards the players. To us, the players always come first. My background is also as a Poker player so I try to always see things as a player and focus on that.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Apart from a great user experience I think we have quite a good bonus and promotional offers. We have some interesting features such as “PIX to Crypto” for the Brazil market where players can deposit with the local method PIX and it gets seamless converted to the Brazilian stable coin BRZ for gameplay. We are also in the process of launching a Telegram Casino Bot under the same brand.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Our platform is a “Crypto first,” and as such, we believe it should essentially be KYC-free and anonymous for the most part. To keep up with licensing and regulations, we only require KYC in cases where we identify suspicions of fraud or other security reasons.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We follow the best industry standards in terms of encryption and storage as per our gaming license.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Affiliate Marketing and Paid Media are important to kickstart our brand, but we are also playing the long game and trying to generate organic interest in web and social media content that is actually relevant to players. We also do more direct marketing using Telegram, WhatsApp, and other direct channels.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
I would say it’s affiliate marketing.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
That has never happened.
We don’t have a lot of “Whales” and focus mostly on the small/average player. We limit our exposure and manage risk to match that target group because we know how to cater to them. I would say we see regular wins of $10 -15k in our database of players. I can’t really pinpoint the largest one, but it’s in that ballpark.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We get quite a lot of Sportsbetting traffic from Brazil. From Europe slots are still king but crash games are closing in fast . Live casino games such as roulette have less players but a high margin for the house .
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Yeah, that’s part of the game, and there’s always someone trying to get an edge in whichever way. We have really innovative security and fraud detection systems with the help of AI and an expert team.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
I can confirm that there is no “Doom Switch “. We can’t change any settings like that.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
No. I have never even heard of something like that.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We have detection systems that take into account actions and patterns to detect this. Today, with the help of AI, this can be detected very early on. Then, we try to get them the help they need and advise on steps they can take to stop.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
I think the methods exist but some casinos don’t really care to implement them to full extent as they just don’t care.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
I work well under stress, so it is actually a motivating factor for me.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Gaming is my career and passion, so I have no plans to move away from it at this time.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
We are soon launching our Telegram Casino Platform, and we are very excited about that. In the long run, we plan to leverage the community side of gaming, as it is done in the eSports community, but with a twist that appeals to Casino players. That’s a long-time project of mine.
Stake Casino: Play with Crypto and Win Big
Give us a try, we work hard so you can make VLW.Bet you gaming home!
