Truly decentralized gambling: Interview with KoinSwap CEO John Markus

Online gambling and casino platforms have flourished with the onset of blockchains and cryptocurrencies.

While blockchain promises an increased sense of privacy, cheaper fees, and faster withdrawals for players. Its state of centralization could comprise on the sense of anonymity or privacy that it promises.

Solving this issue, KoinSwap has created a platform that is truly decentralized and provides developers a chance to create games and earn from it.

Users can also open their own casinos in phase 2 of the platform which would allow them to simply clone front-end source from GitHub, put on their own logos and brand it and then earn from it. They can do this without having to pay millions of dollars in licensing for a handful of games. 

In an exclusive interview with AMBCrypto, John Markus, the CEO of KoinSwap talked to us at length about the platform, his motivation behind creating it, the KOIN token, its utility, and much more.

1. Okay, let us start with your introduction. Could you tell us a little about yourself and the motivation behind creating KoinSwap?

I am John, I’ve been a security researcher, and penetration tester for the last 8 years to 10 years now. I work mainly as a government contractor. I’ve been studying, developing, managing projects, and coding for way longer than that.

After all these years of working, I wanted to invest in something that I really enjoy myself too, that is gambling. I wanted to solve the issues that I had when I was gambling myself with my friends in my free time.

I realized that even though there are thousands of games on these platforms, only a few of them are interesting enough to be played.

Not only this, but these games take a very long time to be produced because it is in the interest of the publishers to release them after a period of time.

I played for a long period of time and for people like me, who get used to games pretty fast, there are no other means of getting new games.

Casinos close accounts for no reason and steal your money just because they can, this is their major intake of money, attempting a google search of “casino froze my account” or “casino froze my money” will show hundreds of millions of results as on every casino venue, they hold the power of “holding the winnings and money for suspected behavior”(that is totally up to them to both decide why and confirm it and don’t even have to tell you the reason for it).

This implies you manipulating the results at your advantage, something which should not be possible and in case it is, we solved it by decentralizing it (publishing sources) and get games audited, but it’s mostly not the real reason, because they would be losing millions and would just fix it instantly, so they are just planning and exerting the right to steal your money, with no secondary factor authority overviewing this process, so there is no reason for any casino to reserve as right such power and KoinSwap does not.

I do not find it reasonable and this is a far bigger concern now than ever before.

Therefore, KoinSwap has a much larger potential now than ever before.

2. Decentralization is the buzzword in the crypto space and there has been an influx of decentralized exchanges, marketplaces, gaming, and gambling platforms. What are your views on the state of decentralization in the industry right now? How is KoinSwap bringing decentralization to its users?

 I want to start by saying that decentralization is actually a buzzword that is used a lot although it is barely understood. Even if everything is decentralized and any one element is not, then the whole purpose is lost.

This is because all other elements would depend on the one centralized element and then everything would still be under the centralized control of people who own the centralized parts of the project.

So, what we want to do that is different from all of these projects is that we want to decentralize every single thing, every single technology information or documentation that we own.

We want to focus on providing people with better information so that they can build their own games and publish it on our platform. Instead of making a new casino or project for themselves, which would require a lot of work, information, and money.

It would be in the best interest of the developers to create games that require low investment of both money and time and receive tens of thousands of $ a day completely passively with no updates required on his end. 

While it’s in the interest of venue makers, aka Casinos to use our source codes to brand their own casino and use our ecosystem allowing them gains and automatically paying out every contributor accordingly to the documentation, creating for anyone with a community a reliable, no-cost, ready solution for having your own casino.

It is important to note that the Casino aka Venue Maker that forks the project and brands it not the developer.

 3. That sounds great! Moving on could you tell us more about your proof-of-concept protocol and how it is helping game developers? What was the motivation behind creating the same?

Okay, so proof of concept is basically our flagship game. It is not a protocol; it is the product that we want to bring to people so that they understand how to write a code that is both safe to work on blockchain and also playable.

In smart contract technology, it is not possible for example in the code to await x seconds before continuing an action, as a timer would be. So, you cannot wait for 5 seconds to do an action, it cannot be programmed that way as it would be very resource-intensive and you will have to pay a lot of gas.

With proof of concept, we have created a real and working scenario that would let people read its code and understand. Most games need timers and if people do not know how to make a timer then they would not understand how long one or five seconds would be.

So we had to adapt and make sure that we create concepts in a way people understand them.

Our proof of concept is the first game that is published on the platform and with it, we had two things in mind, one to understand ourselves how to do things and then to open-source it so that everyone can understand the same.

4. Ethereum and Polkadot have been the most popular choices for decentralized applications with Ethereum having the most decentralized structure. In such a scenario what was the reason behind choosing the Binance Smart Chain for KoinSwap?

So, Binance is a direct fork from the Ethereum code and it is basically the same. The only difference is that it is a lesser-known and used chain for a smaller number of projects comparatively. So it has a very low processing time like 3 to 5 seconds for transactions and way lower fees.

This was our motivation, as for Ethereum it would be impossible to raise such games where you have to bet every round, and every round could cost you up to $150 in fee which would be unreasonable.

The fact is that on BSC, it is mostly possible and for this time when we wanted to create the project and get its funding, it was reasonable to construct games on it. Due to inter-chain compatibility given from Solidity support on most chains. 

We do already have plans to switch to our own chain because it is actually way better and it would have been way more cost-effective as ours would be the only project hosted on it. It would also be the same as the fork of BSC and Ethereum.

So it will allow for players to be able to do every action without the need of BNB for fees, but use the same token for paying fees on our chain.

As far as Polkadot is concerned, we researched about it too but preferred BSC to it.

5. KOIN is going to be the utility token on your platform what was the reason behind creating it as a token without a limited supply? Taking the conversation about your token further, what is KOIN-Tear? What are its utilities and how is it different from the KOIN?

Okay, this is a very smart question. So yes the KOIN has an unlimited supply and one of the main reasons for that is marketing.

We plan to create mining farms and since Phase 2 which is our biggest work in progress, from getting funds, producing documentations to allowing developers to write their code and put their listings on our platform.

People who own our token would have nothing meaningful to do with it during this time and so we decided that due to that fact we want to provide the proof of concept game for people to see that this is possible.

We decided to give away some of the coins to people so that everyone can test the game. We will be dropping KOIN’s support in Phase 2 and KOIN-T will be the only token supported on our platform.

Meanwhile, people can play on our platform using the KOIN but only pre-sale purchasers who back our project will receive the same amount of KOIN-T. This would allow us to deflate the KOIN economy however we want and also allow everyone to play.

People who purchase and hold KOIN would receive KOIN-T of the same amount but it would be more valuable as KOIN is inflationary but KOIN-T would have a maximum supply of 1100000000. So this will give them a token with much bigger value and use cases without losing anything.

As far as the use cases of KOIN-T are concerned,one of the things we are looking at as a use case is the games. We are also planning to have a marketplace where people can sign up as sellers and ship and receive products using only our currency or token.

This is because of late I have observed that there is a lack of marketplaces where one can buy things using cryptocurrencies. The existing ones are more centralized than decentralized and this is another reason why we want to go ahead with this plan.

6. Okay, perfect. So tell us more about the $20,000 giveaway on Twitter and your opinion on how Twitter and social media for that matter are important in the crypto ecosystem?

Social media plays an important role in how the crypto ecosystem works. However, I also believe that in addition to the information people get on social media, it is important to develop an understanding of their own regarding any project and so they should look at the documentation of projects and form their own opinion about them.

It is a great place for promotions and marketing though. But a lot of people on social media focus more on pumping and fluctuating the price of crypto rather than educating people about their use cases.

The $20,000 giveaway we launched was with the clear purpose of getting more people interested in our project and allowing them to play our game. They can do this with the free money we are giving them. We are providing a value and a use case for it.

We are not saying that people should join us because our token is going to be pumped to millions, rather we are saying that people should join us if they are interested in this sphere and because we are giving them an opportunity to play with our own money. If you win then it is your money, even if you lose it is yours.

We just want to give people the KOIN and a chance to play, with no contractual obligations or wagering requirements. If you don’t want to play then you can sell it to someone who does, directly from our exchange at https://presale.koinswap.finance .

Two main reasons for this is that we want players to see that it is the best solution out there in the market because of its perks. We will not block your money and that is something, we believe you cannot find anywhere else.

The second big reason is that its price will not be affected. Now since KOIN is only a gateway token and in phase 2 we will have KOIN-T which would be given to pre-sale owners. Even injecting $20,000 worth of tokens will not have much effect on its use case or on people’s investment.

Overall, it would be positive for both us and the players.

 7. So KoinSwap is getting ready for an upcoming presale and community engagement is an essential part of any project’s success. Could you tell us more about the presale and your goals of engaging your userbase and community with it?

I believe that human engagement is crucial to any project and it is important for us that people go through our project, play our games and give feedback about it. From the point of owning a project especially, I need feedback, and the only way for me to get it is through engaging a big and diverse community.

As far as the pre-sale is concerned, we have put together everything that is required before the pre-sale. The only thing that can improve is the game itself. So we are going to make better tests and collect feedback from the users.

We call it ‘feedback of the people’ and it is just the base for everything we do. So if they do not like our product or something we do, we cannot ignore them.

Our main aim would be to make a game that people like and are able to play not because we want to get more money, but because we want to build a strong community.

For that reason, we are going to request players to provide us feedbacks during the pre-sale. After that, we would be publishing information and updates until Phase 2 is ready for testing.

To answer your question the only feedback we need during the pre-sale is regarding the same which we have already started collecting since the game is already live right now.

8. Do you have a marketing strategy for the long term?

Yes. We of course have a marketing strategy and our marketing strategy is that we have to reach Phase 2 for documenting everything and for the first developers to come. As long as the first products and the first games start rolling out we are going to have a bigger interest.

If you understand any type of economy, casinos, make millions, basically, by owning KOIN or KOIN-T or by being a developer with us you would own one-third of the casino.

For reference, it took us 3 weeks to think about the game, to create it, and, to have it fixed and more or less modified to be acceptable.

So in 3 weeks, we created a type of product that will make a million dollars in revenue in the next 3 months, completely passively. So, we are planning the marketing for Phase 2 to have a few developers in coming.

After this, we are planning to hit forums where centralized casino players engage and try to make them understand why they should play on our platform. Educating them and increasing the influx of players, creating higher gains for everyone and creating a budget to be reinvested towards a better and more efficient system.

9. So my last question to you is that what are some of the upcoming projects and partnerships that we can look forward to?

Okay, so any type of servers that you could make and people could connect to it, like Minecraft or GTA 5 servers can integrate our smart contract and create a gambling environment. Our project is made in a way that there is no backend and for this reason, everyone could make their own frontend view and it would work out!

You could, for example, download our webpage from GitHub open on the PC offline local page and it would work!

It is also the reason why we are decentralizing and using our code people can make their own casino just by copy-pasting files, changing the logo without having to pay thousands of dollars in fees for games.

After we raise money through our pre-sale, We will look at partnerships and invest in them.

As for the ones we have right now, they include a household name like CertiK, which is going to provide us a custom-developed heuristic analysis solution to determine exploit and check the game parameters to be as required from the documentation, like having the correct return for the player, and on the fly, test run.

The cost for such audit due to our partnership with CertiK goes from 15’000$ that is their requested price normally for each audit, to 500$/1000$. We will in the future develop our own heuristic solution and will remove this cost completely.

For more information about KoinSwap, please check out their website.

Disclaimer: This is a paid post and should not be treated as news/advice.