Gamer Guru Betting on Token Gambling
Unikrn is an esports betting platform bringing together professional video gamers for matches that resemble golf or tennis tournaments. The site has established a substantial foothold in the gaming world, and now plans to expand into cryptocurrency wagering with UnikoinGold, an ethereum-based version of its existing coin, Unikoin.
UnikoinGold will allow users to legally and fully engage in live betting with cryptocurrency. The company has already convinced a bevy of bold name investors of its worth, drawing funds from Mark Cuban, Ashton Kutcher, Elisabeth Murdoch, Shari Redstone, and 500 Startups. When it launches its ICO, Unikrn plans to sell 100 million USD in UnikoinGold.
Rahul Sood is the CEO of the operation. He previously founded VoodooPC, which was acquired by Hewlett Packard, and became an executive at the larger company. He led the development of such technologies as fanless PC technology, liquid cooling, and active liquid chilling and was the first to bring them to market in the high-performance computer gaming industry.
He later worked at Microsoft in interactive entertainment before starting Unikrn, which plans an initial token offering in September. He talked with BlockTribune about his computing background and plans for growth in the eSports betting world, which some analysts predict will be a billion-dollar business soon.
BLOCK TRIBUNE: What was your earliest gaming experience? What games did you play as a kid?
RAHUL SOOD: I played StarCraft and Dune. It was the first RTF game to come out from Westwood Studios. And those are like my early PC games. But even before that, when I was a kid, I had an Apple IIc and a Commodore 64 and I used to play all kinds of games on those things.
BLOCK TRIBUNE: When you started your business career, you got into computers. Did you ever consider creating your own game or anything like that?
RAHUL SOOD: Not really, I was more into the hardware and the design of the hardware. So when I got into computers, I really wanted to create really beautiful hardware, specifically to play games on. It was mostly driven by the noise that was being created by the machines themselves. They were way too loud. I wanted to create silent PCs, and that’s the direction that I went when I was younger.
BLOCK TRIBUNE: Okay. Let’s shift into the present day and talk about Unikrn and how it works. First, walk me through how you envision it will work once the tokens are out there.
RAHUL SOOD: Sure. So the first thing to remember is that Unikrn, when we started the company three years ago, we raised $10 million, and our aim was to really focus on the community itself. Like build a product for the community and to become a part of the community. So over the last few years, we’ve taken our data and we’ve turned that data into content, everything from written content to video content to eSports odds on all of the major matches, using player data and things like that.
We’ve created some really cool betting products that are customer-facing, where customers can bet on our platform through regulated markets. We’ve even made an acquisition of a company called LEET that helps casinos and actually helped start-up the first eSports-friendly casino in Las Vegas, and there is a whole bunch more to come. And on top of that, we have team ownership. We have our own tournament series and our content is starting to get syndicated by a number of the communities as well.
So the long story short is we became part of the fabric of the eSports community. And as part of that, we still wanted to create a token that allowed our community to access and use the platform. So about two years ago, we created something called the Unikoin, which is the free token you earn. It had, I would say, not a ton of usage at the beginning. But over the last year, the usage has just gone up significantly, and it’s very popular. So people use the Unikoin to engage on our platform.
We use it to measure new markets and test out new products. Test the efficacy of our sports book and new betting products and things like that. And we recently decided to take the Unikoin and sell them by turning them into cryptocurrency. There are a number of reasons why we are going down this path.
A little over a year ago, Mark Cuban hit us up and told us to start looking up blockchain immediately for our business. We started to look at it and we understood very quickly why it could change the future of our business. The biggest part for us is the transparency.
When you are dealing in a very highly regulated business like ours, AML, Anti Money Laundering, and KYC, Know Your Customer, is super important. With blockchain, it’s much easier for us to manage AML and KYC because of the open ledger, and also it’s easy for us to expand the business across markets and across regions because you don’t have to worry about currencies. You just have one currency, essentially.
So that is why we decided to go this way and essentially we are going to take the Unikoin token and turn it to Unikoin gold, and that’s where we are.
BLOCK TRIBUNE: What will be the overall impact on the gaming community?
RAHUL SOOD: I think it’s going to be significant. I think that our community is very technology savvy. They tend to skew younger. Many of them actually have their own crypto-wallets, and they’re already into cryptocurrencies. So when they heard that Unikrn was going to take the Unikoin and turn it into crypto, the interest just spiked.
So they’re super excited about it. And for us, the reason that we are limiting the number of tokens that we put out in the market is because we are catering to our community. We are not catering to speculators. We really want to get our community involved and using it, and we want to use the reserve Unikoins that we have left over to be able to expand to new regions by giving new communities the opportunity to participate on our platforms. And also we’ve had a number of betting operators that have approached us about licensing our odds.
We kind of paused on that. We are not really excited about licensing our odds, but we are excited about licensing our platform, as long as they use our tokens. So that’s kind of the direction that we’re going. Plus, we are just not about betting on eSports. We have skill-based and spectator-based betting products, but we also have non-betting experiences as well. We have raffle rooms coming up, where if you are a Unikoin gold holder, you can get into exclusive rooms with exclusive prices.
There is going to be premium features for Unikoin gold holders like premium content and premium applications. People will actually be able to earn Unikoin gold and silver for playing games on our platform. There is a lot of really cool non-gambling features that we are going to be launching as well over 90 to 180 days after the tokens.
BLOCK TRIBUNE: What’s going to be the impact on players? They are already obviously competing for cash and prizes. Will there be any added incentives by this going live?
RAHUL SOOD: There will be more incentives because we run our own tournament series right now, and, in fact, we just had this really small Australian Open. It was very popular. We took a few of the best Australian teams and we had them run through a tournament. Our viewership on our Twitch channel has gone up significantly, and we are going to run tournaments and use the Unikoin gold as prizes as well.
