It goes without saying that one of the most significant concerns for crypto enthusiasts is the lack of scalability. Fortunately, a number of viable solutions have been launched over the years with varying degrees of success but all of them have proved that scalability in crypto can be achieved in the industry. At the ICE London 2019, we got to see the efforts of Fasttoken, a not so recent entrant into the crypto gambling space that is hell-bent on sharing its experience as it works towards achieving scalability and help the crypto industry grow even further.
Following six months of hard development work, Fasttoken chose to attend the ICE albeit with a rather unique approach – the company publicized all code regarding their state channels implementation, a first in the online gambling industry. Just like other scalability solutions like Raiden and the Lightning Network, the end goals of Fasttoken’s state channels are geared towards improving certain important aspects of blockchain including, but not limited to:
- The number of transactions per second, (The state channels increase these significantly enough to improve scalability.)
- Confirmation times for transactions (These are lowered to just a couple of seconds or even milliseconds.) and,
- Overall fees on the blockchain ecosystem. (These are reduced significantly since the gas fees within state channels are almost non-existent.)
Why Is the Fasttoken Solution a Big Deal?
Well, it is undeniable the both Raiden and the Lightning Network have very broad use-cases within and outside the crypto industry. Raiden, for instance, can easily serve as a platform for various decentralized applications, Internet of Things apps and decentralized applications while the Lightning Network has proven to be a viable solution for extremely fast payments.
However, both Raiden and Lightning Network do not even come close to matching up to creating online gambling solutions of the same caliber as state channels. The gambling industry almost always depends on turn-based systems and state channels are virtually perfect these. In essence, developers can use state channels to control these turn-based systems entirely off-chain, and process the payments and bets based on the outcomes of the games being operated on the chain.
This is great news especially for crypto-focused or crypto-based online gambling platforms which have also risen in number over the past year thanks to the boom in cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications. Even though the crypto market has slumped, these applications have proven that they are here to stay.
