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Nigel Eccles announced plans to launch a new online gambling site.
You might have heard of him. Eccles is responsible for co-founding FanDuel, now the largest sportsbook app in the US.
He along with FanDuel's other co-founder, Rob Jones, are behind the new international cryptocurrency casino and sportsbook, BetHog.
$6 million in seed funding was used to start the new site.
At the start, BetHog will focus on the Asian and Latin American market while offering online casino games created in-house. The company, which only accepts cryptocurrency deposits, plans to lean on global gaming live streamers to build an audience and play up its social elements.
From Sportico:
The company’s business approach is inspired by areas of stagnation the FanDuel co-founders believe have taken hold in the gambling industry, as well as pain points they endured at the Flutter-owned company, which they left in 2017. (Eccles is involved in ongoing litigation in which he accuses the former board, controlled by KKR and Shamrock, of breaching fiduciary duties to its shareholders.) They are entering a sector Eccles acknowledged is crowded, where the minute details are of great importance.
Eccles revealed that the site name and titular hog logo embodies a desire to contrast “conservative” companies unwilling to take risks with their brands.
“(The designer) just immediately grabbed a personality in the hog, you’ll see it,” Eccles said on a phone call. “And we were like, ‘Wow, I love that.’ He’s cheeky, he’s confident. He’s somebody you would like to hang out with.”
Eccles says, while he is not necessarily attached to the blockchain long-term, he recalled a time being spooked in a meeting with PayPal higher-ups in a “windowless” Silicon Valley room while at FanDuel. “There was a risk officer just evaluating whether they were going to keep doing business with us,” Eccles said.
Traditional funding methods like PayPal have long frowned upon partnering with so-called "gray" or "offshore" online gambling sites, many of which have succeeded in recent years through the embrace of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Eccles said accepting crypto over traditional currency would also help in preventing the dreaded charge backs, which were commonplace in the online gambling universe.
BetHog’s plan is to prove itself in emerging markets and prioritize its casino products over its sportsbook before a possible turn toward the U.S. One day, it could also license its proprietary games to other companies, though that is not an immediate priority.
“We just sort of feel that there may be 500 online casinos, but they’re all kind of the same, right?” Eccles said. “They’re the same games, they’re from the same third-party providers, and we think there’s an opportunity to build games that are just more social.”
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