iGB Affiliate 69 June/July | Page 61

I NSI GH T When a customer requests a deposit, we tell them how many dollars they’ll get for the amount of bitcoin they want to bank. We then produce the BTC address for them to send the bitcoin to, and so long as the customer sends it within 15 minutes, we’ll honor the dollar amount previously agreed. Thus WPN will take on any currency fluctuation that the coin may experience during the time it takes us to process the deposit. For withdrawals, we give players the amount of dollars that they request in bitcoin, whether it takes us an hour or a day to process. So for example, if you request a bitcoin cashout of $2,000, you’re always going to get $2,000-worth of bitcoin. Obviously, this does increase the exposure on our end, so we had to develop processes to mitigate risk. To this end, we hired a team of cryptocurrency investors, who are constantly monitoring our positions in each type of coin. We also had to determine exactly how much USD or bitcoin we needed to enable us to handle every deposit and withdrawal request on any given day. Customer education: Bitcoin’s recent coverage in the mainstream media has done wonders to educate our player base as to what it’s all about. Still, the vast majority of people remain clueless about what bitcoin and cryptocurrency is, let alone how to execute the steps involved to make their first deposit. We needed to provide as simple an explanation as possible as to what a cryptocurrency is, and how to use it. We gave the customer a step-by-step guide, from choosing a wallet or exchange, to how to purchase their cryptocurrency and then send it our way. We also had to be very careful about what wallets and exchanges we recommended. Some players in the game are much more secure than others, and there have been plenty of instances of early disasters and stolen money. Take the popular Tokyo exchange Mt. Gox, which at one point was trading roughly 70% of worldwide bitcoin transactions. It ended up being the victim of a massive cyber-attack that resulted in more than $8,750,000-worth of bitcoin being lost to hackers. If we had sent our customers there in the beginning, we’d have had a lot of unhappy people on our case. To ensure impartiality and avoid potential problems, we monitor the top sites and constantly update our information. Then, rather than recommending just one exchange, we send our players a list and let them make an informed choice. Accountability is also one of the major reasons why we decided to accept 60 cryptocurrencies instead of just bitcoin like many of our competitors. Sure, bitcoin is currently the market leader and by far the most-used cryptocurrency among our player base. But still, anything can happen and we don’t want to be one-dimensional. If people’s cryptocurrency preferences change, or if there’s a security flaw in the blockchain, we want to be able to offer the alternative that people want. “The vast majority of people remain clueless about what bitcoin and cryptocurrency is, let alone how to execute the steps involved to make their first deposit” Despite these challenges, incorporating cryptocurrency into our business has been well worth it. In fact, just seeing the dramatic boost to our bottom line and knowing the success that cryptocurrency has had on our business, makes us very excited about the future and the benefits still in store. This is true not only for our business, but for the entire online gaming industry. iGB Affiliate Issue 69 JUN/JUL 2018 57