Nigel Eccles is best known as a founder for the US betting behemoth FanDuel, but his latest venture is a crypto-based online gaming world inhabited by animated pigs, he tells Alea founder Alex Tomic in the iGB@ICE studio.
Cryptocurrency, he says, solves one of the main struggles faced by operators: having to rely on payment networks and banks.
“One of the biggest challenges I always found as an operator back at FanDuel was payments, being reliant on Visa and Mastercard and being worried that provider might just disappear,” says Eccles.
But with crypto-powered BetHog, he says, that reliance vanishes. “Those that own crypto tend to be more aligned with betting,” he explains. “They are younger, they skew male, they are risk seeking. There’s $4 trillion in crypto assets just sitting there and there’s nothing to do with it so I think that’s really exciting.”
The problem with being a pioneer
Eccles is a master of jumping into a sector or venture during its embryonic stages, but there is a fair amount of risk attached to that he tells Tomic.
“Being the very first is hard because investors are like ‘we’ve never seen anything like this before’ and they hate investing in new things.”
When it comes to crypto betting and gaming, Eccles says BetHog is in no way a pioneer. He cites Stake as one operator that has “made enormous strides in this sector”.
On product, Eccles talks up the company’s in-house games and the titles that are unique to them. He also digs into UX and UI and tackling prominent issues faced by players.
Early adoption comes to fruition
“The devil is in the details,” Tomic says on tackling UX/UI niggles. “The issues experienced are very broad.” Tomic also shares his experiences on being a first mover in virtual reality gaming via Alea’s first-ever virtual casino established in 2015.
“We’re in 2025, 10 years later and we have to wait years for app stores to accept the gambling industry. So 2030 should be the year we have gambling apps available for VR.”
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